A nostalgia for something that had never been? An envy at their intimacy? She wondered what it would have been like if Sam had been her lover.
The thing I find profoundly hopeful when I’m feeling despair is to imagine people playing, to believe that no matter how bad the world gets, there will always be players.
I forget how young you are. You’re still at the age where you mistake your friends and your colleagues for family.” “Yes, Dov,” she said, trying to hide her irritation. “When you have children, you’ll never be able to worry about a friend as much again,” Dov said.
She had, he thought, one of the world’s great laughs. The kind of laugh where a person didn’t feel that he was being laughed at. The kind of laugh that was an invitation: I cordially invite you to join in this matter that I find amusing.
If Sadie and Sam had been lovers, Sadie was certain she would have been seen as Sam’s helpmate, and not as an artist in her own right. Many people saw her that way already.
Complete waste,” she said. “Sorry, Sam. The universe tortured you because it could, because it will. The enormous polyhedral die in the sky was rolled, and it came up ‘Torture Sam Masur.
People are attached to their bookstores, more attached than A. J. Fikry ever would have ever guessed. It matters who placed A Wrinkle in Time in your twelve-year-old daughter’s nail-bitten fingers.
How to explain to Destiny that the thing that made her work leap forward in 1996 was that she had been a dervish of selfishness, resentment, and insecurity? Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.
Sam considered his French fries. “Are there other worlds?
I knew your mother so well I could play her part. The same with my own mother and my grandmother and my childhood best friend, Euna, who drowned my the lake by her cousin’s house. There are no ghosts, but up here – she gestured towards her head – it’s a haunted house.
So, I do want to be rich and famous. I am, as you know, a bottomless pit of ambition and need. But I also want to make something sweet.
Despite everything that transpired at Unfair Games on December 4th, 2005, and despite evidence to the contrary, it is not an inevitability that we should be our worst selves behind the mask of an avatar.
You are happy and you are bored. You need to find a new pastime.
Next time, we fail better.
It was as if she were a mathematical proof that had eluded him for many years, but all at once, with fresh, well-rested eyes, the proof had a completely obvious solution.
And sometimes, you get an extra life. But you might kill yourself trying to get the extra life, so it’s not always worth it.
Sadie felt as if she had been tricked into behaving amorally.
Life is quite difficult here, and even the most independent among us find it beneficial to pair up.
That’s the gamer in you, trying to figure out how you might have beat the level. My brain is treacherous like that, too. But there was nothing you could have done, Ant. The game wasn’t winnable.
The two of them had easily slipped back into the rhythms of their friendship, and they saw each other several times a week for movies, meals, games. He felt fortified in her presence. His arguments and observations were sharper.