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In different ways they had both discovered the same truth: that to live out childhood fantasies as a grown-up was to court and wed and bed disaster.

Sure, you can live out your dreams, but it’ll only turn you into a monster.

“Sure, but real life’s not actually like that,” Quentin went on, fumbling after what he was sure was an important insight. “You don’t just go on fun adventures for good causes and have happy endings. You’re not going to be a character in a story, there’s nobody arranging everything for you. The real world just doesn’t work like that.”

But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray interview suit, Quentin knew he wasn’t happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come. He couldn’t think what else to do.

Quentin’s conversations with his parents were so circular and self-defeating, they sounded like experimental theater.

“The problem with growing up,” Quentin said, “is that once you’re grown up, people who aren’t grown up aren’t fun anymore.”

Anyway, the mood he was in, Quentin was willing to take any position on any subject with anybody if it meant he could pick a fight.

“Age,” Quentin heard him mutter. “It’s wasted on the young. Just like youth.”

It was so easy to ignore people when you understood how little power they really had over you.

The power to create order is one thing. The power to destroy is another. Always they are in balance. But it is easier to destroy than to create, and there are those whose nature it is to love destruction.

Nobody can be touched by that much power without being corrupted.

Some tiny sane part of him knew he was out of control, but that wasn’t the part of him that had its hands on the wheel.