Pow Wow

“He saw the Jungle of his life and saw the lurking Beast; then, while he looked, perceived it, as by a stir of the air, rise, huge and hideous, for the leap that was to settle him. His eyes darkened--it was close; and, instinctively turning, in his hallucination, to avoid it, he flung himself, face down, on the tomb.”
― Henry James, The Beast in the Jungle

“And didn't it always go like that--body parts not lining up the way you wanted them to, all of it a little bit off, as if the world itself were an animated sequence of longing and envy and self-hatred and grandiosity and failure and success, a strange and endless cartoon loop that you couldn't stop watching, because, despite all you knew by now, it was still so interesting.”
― Meg Wolitzer, The Interestings