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much of this novel feels like a metaphor for anxiety about growing up

she is a password, and a password is an act of creation. is the counterpoint to fear/evil.

this places them in a hierarchy. the agency of any particular word conforms to grammar conventions. a pronoun is seen as not being able to affect as much change as sasha who is described as being a verb in the imperative mood (an action that is absolutely crucial to the state of mind, or feeling, of the entire universe).

at the institute, they partake in a process that deconstructs them as a person and reassembles them again in this new form. with a change in perception, they can see the world, sometimes themselves, when later on in the process, as their potential when actualized. they know that they are a word, and what type of word they are.

others, like the people forced into going to the Institute, are more substantive. they are adverbs, verbs, pronouns, nouns, etc. the goal of the institute is to change human beings to literalized words that can “reverberate” in the language of the universe and so potentially change the fabric of reality, depending on what they actually are.

so the universe is defined entirely by language. every single thing, every person, is a piece of language that contextualizes everything. some people are dashes and commas and brackets; the grammar of the universe.

“She wonders when he will stop texting her proof of life. Perhaps that will be the true end of the marriage, when they no longer need to know: Are you still alive?"

“maybe this is why Lila has no real friends, Phoebe thinks. She doesn’t know how to keep them. She keeps trading them in for something else.”

“ the hotel feels very empty. Like a stage just before the big performance. Everybody must be off doing their last-minute tasks before the rehearsal, getting dressed in their costumes.”

“Pretending to be excited. Pretending you haven’t said the same exact joke over and over again. Pretending knowledge is some beautiful, fortuitous interweaving quilt of facts. Pretending that everything that happens can be strung along a satisfying, linear narrative.”

“I think the collector’s impulse is both beautiful and repugnant,” she says.
To collect is to care more than most. But it is also to hoard. To take things out of the world and make them only yours.”

“How have you never smoked weed?’
“I think it’s as simple as nobody has ever offered it to me. It’s like people can look at me and somehow tell that I don’t want to do drugs.”
“That was the first thing I noticed about you,” Jim says.

“lately she worries she always read books just for the feelings they gave her in the end, and she’s not sure how this is any different from reading porn.”

“The affair is the easy way out—the fantasy of believing someone else can give you what you don’t know how to give yourself.”

“Gary’s mother cornered me for the third time this morning and asked why God has not yet made an appearance at this wedding,” Lila whispers as soon as she gets in. “I was like, Oh no, I completely forgot to invite him.”

“what she has secretly always wanted. To read books when she wanted to read books. To be sad when she was sad. To be scared when she was scared. To be angry when she was angry. To be boring when she felt boring.”

“Grandma said that when the priest spills the wine, he has to lick it off the floor,” Juice says. “Because it’s literally Jesus. And if you don’t, then Jesus will just sit there on the linoleum for the rest of time.”

“He doesn’t deserve a response, she thinks. He deserves to suffer like she did, to spiral out of control. Because that was the problem. He never lost control. ”

“ Watching a couple try to be a couple, even though they are a couple.”

“Is this the moment when the protagonist throws her phone into the ocean to symbolize how she’s ready to live a new life?” he asks.
“Yes,” Phoebe says. “And in the next scene, you can find me waiting in line at the Apple store to buy a new phone, like, immediately.”

“The roll of laughter so steady and constant, rising and falling like waves. The constant motion of the world. If the problem is loneliness, then in this way, and maybe in only this way, Mrs. Dalloway is the hero for giving everybody a place to be.”

“the phone feels foreign in her hand, like some object pulled from an archaeological dig, filled with messages that no longer have anything to do with her.”

“When does the pretending stop?” Lila asks.
“I’d like to say whenever you want it to,” Phoebe says, but she knows this isn’t true. It’s harder than that. “But I think it stops when you get fed up.”

“I’ve had this feeling that we’re just pretending to still be friends. Reenacting the friendship the way it used to be, when we were actually close. That’s sort of how it is with everyone here,” Lila says. “Like I’m pretending. Acting out this idea of what we once were or what we could be.”

“Phoebe is supposed to be dead. She is supposed to be a cold slab at the morgue right now, but instead she is going to eat Patriotic French Toast and go sailing. ”

“Hey,” Matt whispered in her ear, “want to get married here?”
He whispered it so casually, it stunned Phoebe. The same way he said, Hey, let’s have a beer. Like their marriage was a thing so natural, so organic, it grew all around them like grass.”

She wasnt like Mia, who cut her hair short over the pandemic, who finished her third book with the word Bitch in the title, who had the audacity to not only fuck someone else’s husband, but to start a new life with him. Mia was a Modernist, liked experiments, bold forms, poems that made no fucking sense. If Mia wanted to kill herself, she would put the stones in her pocket and walk into the water like Virginia Woolf.

“She picks up the brush from the wicker basket. She combs her feathery bangs back into place. She puts a cold washcloth to the back of her neck. She is so quiet, so steady, it almost feels holy, like watching a nun prepare herself for the Lord.”