Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death -those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement- been so brutal or been painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.

...with a grief no less sharp for not being intimate with its object.

Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children - children lie all the time

Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?

Beauty is rarely soft or consolatory. Quite the contrary. Genuine beauty is always quite alarming.

Being the only female in what was basically a boys’ club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn’t compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature one would have her seem.