She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a… — Emily St John Mandel

Sometimes you don’t know you’re going to throw a grenade until you’ve already pulled the pin.

Isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?

What you have to understand is that bureaucracy is an organism, and the prime goal of every organism is self-protection. Bureaucracy exists to protect itself.