Katabasis

Those who had nothing substantial to brag about bragged the loudest.

Karma is a natural consequence. Badness accrues. It affects the way you live your life, how you perceive the world. When you do evil things, you see the world as petty and selfish and cruel. And what you experience in Hell is just the final ripple effect of your original evil. You get precisely what you asked for. And I think the whole point of Hell is to show you the full extent of what you wanted.

To be honest she had never gotten round to trying Proust, but Cambridge had made her the kind of person who wanted to have read Proust, and she figured Hell was a good place to start.

He was simply born brilliant, all that knowledge poured by gods without spillage into his brain.

She was not alone. She was safe. There was at least a single other soul in this universe who vibrated at her same frequency.

The world is not a complete system; there is always an exception. No explanation for its existence; no reason why one might expect it to have existed before or to ever exist again. The world was simply unknowable; exceptions cropped up all the time, and all you had to do to beat the odds was just look

Perhaps human intelligence was a mistake, and everyone who celebrated the escape from the Garden of Eden was wrong. Perhaps the gift of rationality did not outweigh the debilitating agony that came with it.

And so perhaps it was entirely possible - common, even - for you to look into the eyes of someone you'd been falling in love with, someone you had spent every waking moment with, whose breathing sounded as familiar as your own - and fail to recognize them at all.

How wonderful, truly, to have a friend whose silence you adored.

I wish I were the night, so that I might watch your sleep with a thousand eyes.