Lev Grossman

It was a bookstore, and he felt at home in bookstores, and he hadn’t had that feeling much lately. He was going to enjoy it. He pushed his way back through the racks of greeting cards and cat calendars, back to where the actual books were, his glasses steaming up and his coat dripping on the thin carpet. It didn’t matter where you were, if you were in a room full of books you were at least halfway home.

He couldn’t ignore how conspicuously beautiful Venice was. People had been living here for what, a thousand years? More? God only knew whose crazy idea it was to build a city in the middle of a lagoon, but you couldn’t argue with the results.

His heart went out to that weird, solitary man in his uncomfortable hut. He’d never met him. They wouldn’t have had much to say to each other if they had. But whoever that hermit was, he obviously despised his fellow man, and that meant he was OK in Eliot’s book.

“Tell me, what’s the first thing a hacker does once he breaks into a system?”

“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “He steals a bunch of credit card numbers and subscribes to a lot of really premium porn sites?”

“He sets up a back door.” It was good to know that even having attained enlightenment Penny was still impervious to humor. “So that if he’s ever locked out, he can get back in.”

It was strange to be naked in front of Pouncy after all the time they’d spent together clothed. It was strange to be naked in front of anybody. It was like that cold water out there in the bay: scary, you didn’t think you could stand it, but then you plunged in and pretty soon you got used to it. There was enough hiding in life. Sometimes you just wanted to show somebody your tits.

It was fair to call it depression. She felt like shit, all the time. If that was depression, she had it. It must have been contagious. She’d caught it from the world.

By now he had learned enough to know that when he was getting annoyed at somebody else, it was usually because there was something that he himself should be doing, and he wasn’t doing it.

He had no interest in TV anymore—it looked like an electronic puppet show to him, an artificial version of an imitation world that meant nothing to him anyway.

“Stop looking for the next secret door that is going to lead you to your real life. Stop waiting. This is it: there’s nothing else. It’s here, and you’d better decide to enjoy it or you’re going to be miserable wherever you go, for the rest of your life, forever.”

“You can’t just decide to be happy.”

“No, you can’t. But you can sure as hell decide to be miserable. Is that what you want?”

He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping and uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters. It wasn’t something he had much practice at.

Quentin wished she weren’t so attractive. Unpretty women were so much easier to deal with in someways—you didn’t have to face the pain of their probable unattainability.

We have reached the point where ignorance and neglect are the best we can hope for in a ruler.