But what's so great about being a perfectionist?... You do all this work, and then the stuff you've made just pisses you off.

But indifference would ultimately commend itself as a devastating weapon.

For that matter, thinking of one's self as exceptional is probably more the rule than not.

I didn't care about anything. And there's a freedom in apathy, a wild, dizzying liberation on which you can almost get drunk. You can do anything. Ask Kevin.

Got nothing to do with trying. You like someone, or you don't. If you're 'trying', you don't.

Yet Irina had once tucked away, she wasn't sure when or why, that happiness is almost definitionally a condition of which you are not aware at the time. To inhabit your own contentment is to be wholly present, with no orbiting satellite to take clinical readings of the state of the planet. Conventionally, you grow conscious of happiness at the very point that it begins to elude you. When not misused to talk yourself into something - when not a lie - the h-word is a classification applied in retrospect. It is a bracketing assessment, a label only decisively pasted onto an era once it is over.

I was mortified by the prospect of becoming hopelessly trapped in someone else's story.