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I was already unhappy, but I didn’t know it. It seemed to me that little Bianca, right after her beautiful birth, had suddenly changed and treacherously taken for herself all my energy, all my strength, all my capacity for imagination. It seemed to me that my husband, too caught up in his fury of accomplishment, didn’t notice that his daughter, now that she was born, had become voracious, demanding, hostile as she had never seemed when she was in my stomach. I gradually discovered that I didn’t have the strength to make the second experience exalting, like the first. My head sank inside the rest of my body, there seemed no prose, verse, rhetorical figure, musical phrase, film sequence, color capable of taming the dark beast I was carrying in my womb. The real breakdown for me was that: the giving up of any sublimation of my pregnancy, the destruction of the happy memory of the first pregnancy, the first birth.
[...] . I thought how one opaque action generates others of increasingly pronounced opacity, and so the problem is to break the chain. Elena would be happy to have her doll again, I said to myself. Or no, a child never wants only what it’s asking for, in fact a satisfied demand makes even more unbearable the need that has not been confessed.
[...] The spring of his sophomore year, he began to read from feverish loneliness, a loneliness he began to fear would be permanent. After all, if someone like him, wasn't happy in college, where and when would he be happy? His disappointment and isolation made him bitter, and he judged the world around him harshly, with the too-broad strokes of a crank. [...]
idk why i wanted to save this. it's kind of sad and interesting i guess. the last sentence ends in a really clunky way
[...] People instinctively wanted her approval. Between this authoritative air and her sunny good looks, Kristen was, in the world's crude judgment, a catch for Nate, several notches above him in the college social hierarchy. [...]
mild inspo for N on E (world's approval)
Nate felt not only glad but vindicated, as if a long-running argument had finally been settled in his favor. His unpopularity, though persistent, had never seemed quite right. He was not and had never been a nervous, nebbishy sort; his interest in science fiction, never very intense, had peaked at age thirteen. He had always been a rather well-disposed and agreeable sort of person, if he said so himself.
He knew he'd trul arrived when he began dating Elisa [...] Water, as they say, eventually finds its level.
this idea of feeling vindicated, knowing what you deserve, waiting for it to arrive...
Nate remembered something else: the belief that success was something that just happened to you, that you just did your thing, and if you were deserving, it was bestowed by the same invisible hand that ensured that the deli would have milk to drink and sandwiches to buy. Wouldn't that be nice? Nate sometimes envied people less clear-sighted, people so seduced by success itself that their enthusiasm for successful people was wholly genuine. [...]
N believes this throughout most of hte book
[...] He had wondered if everybody took the quality they had and treated it as the most important thing - used it as a basis for feeling superior to others.
important concept, though could be better worded
So it hardly seemed to matter that she was not a particularly nice girlfriend. Unless they coincided with hers, Elisa treated his desires as perverse whims, wholly negligible. An expensive restaurant she liked was a healthy indulgence; his craving for barbecue was "disgusting." A somewhat down-market local barbecue chain he especially liked? "Out of the question." After social engagements, she enjoyed regaling him with a list of criticisms of his behavior. She seemed to think that everything he did was first and foremost a reflection on her. [...]
yikes. she's similar to N i guess
[...] She had been spoiled by her good looks and good fortune; she lacked inner resources; she was petulant and childish when things didn't go her way. [...]
Elisa. pretty insightful
[...] He hated that being passed over in favor of Eugene bothered him as much as it did. It suggested a pettiness and an insecurity that he associated with mediocrity. It was not exactly the light in which he wanted Hannah, who was nobody's fool, to see him. Besides, between the two of them, he had always played the role of the more successful writer. He had been the one to champion her work, to build her up. For their roles to be reversed, even temporarily, would only add to his sense of indignity.
so self-absorbed wow. relevant for N??