Catarina | cat literary world’s Reviews > Katabasis > Status Update

“For one of them had to keep the cheer; one of them had to be delusional. This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional.”

“Good jobs were vanishing rare in academia. (…) She had trained her entire life to do this one thing, and if she could not do it, then she had no reason to live.”

as a subject, she would dissolve like a sugar cube in tea. She was in no state to work, and she had not been for a long time. What Alice needed most then was a nice long holiday, and then perhaps institutionalization at some remote facility near the sea.
But missing the lab was not an option.”

“She was of course underpaid and overworked, but this condition was common among graduate students and no one cared much about it. But she had also not slept properly in three months. She’d drunk so much caffeine that the world shimmered, and her chalk trembled in her grip. She felt, as she often did, that her body had no defined boundaries from the material world; that if she stopped holding herself together

“One might find it reckless, foolish even, for a magician to leave his life in the hands of underpaid and overworked graduate students” - please open the floor for the queen! I feel I’m in for the greatest critique to academia

“Would she rather graduate, produce brilliant research, and go out in a blaze of glory? Or would she rather live out her natural lifespan, gray haired and drooling, fading into irrelevance, consumed by regret?”

“academia respected discipline, rewarded effort, but even more, it adored genius that didn’t have to try.” - OPEN THE FLOOR FOR THE QUEEN 👏