← Vie’s Library
He wanted nothing that he didn’t already have.
There’s the idea of wilderness, and then there’s the unglamorous labor of it, the never-ending
was a reasonably intelligent person, but there’s a difference between being intelligent and knowing what to do with your life,
She’d never had a clear vision of what she wanted her life to look like, she had always been directionless, but she did know that she wanted to be swept up,
Her life in those days was so disorienting that she often found herself thinking about variations on reality, different permutations of events: an alternate reality where she’d quit working at the Hotel
None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in, so much so that she was struck sometimes by a truly unsettling sense that there were other versions of her life being lived without her, other Vincents engaged in different events.
Maybe this could be enough. Maybe not everyone needs to have a specific ambition. I could be the sort of person who just goes to beautiful places and owns beautiful things. Maybe I could film five-minute videos of every sea and every ocean and perhaps there would be some meaning in that project, some kind of completion.)
“Me neither. You know what I’ve learned about money? I was trying to figure out why my life felt more or less the same in Singapore as it did in London, and that’s when I realized that money is its own country.”
What kept her in the kingdom was the previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money, because that’s what money gives you: the freedom to stop thinking about money.
If you’ve never been without, then you won’t understand the profundity of this, how absolutely this changes your
One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking
stupid.
sense of vacancy pervading the air.
rooms one last time, Leon could tell the house was already done with them, a sense of vacancy pervading the air.
In the shadow country it was necessary to lie down every night with a fear so powerful that it felt to Leon like a physical presence, some malevolent beast that absorbs the light. He lay beside Marie and remembered that in this life there was no space for any kind of error or misfortune. What would happen to her if something happened to him? Marie hadn’t been well in some time. His fear was a weight on his chest in the dark.
lent their lives a certain ease that he’d always appreciated, a sense of blissful unencumbrance