We were always hungry, looking for our own house made of candy, looking for the sweetness that would take the pain away. Hunger leads people to desperate, terrible places, where the tree branches reach like claws...
—Lorraine, The Park
I should be happy, Quentin thought. I'm young and alive and healthy. I have good friends. I have two reasonably intact parents — viz. Dad, an editor of medical textbooks, and Mom, a commercial illustrator with ambitions, thwarted, of being a painter. I am a solid member of the middle-middle class. My GPA is a number higher than most people even realize it is possible for a GPA to be.
But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray interview suit, Quentin knew he wasn't happy. Why not? He had painstakingly assembled all the ingredients of happiness. He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices. But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come.
Do you know what separates humanity from the other beasts of this world? It's not the ability to make tools or complex language or that other nonsense you tell yourself. No, humans are unique in all the world because they're the only creatures that can make themselves miserable. And you know how you do that? You do it by expecting to be happy. You're so busy thinking about happiness, obsessing about finding it and why it isn't where you expected it to be, that you completely miss the point.
—Lotus, Monster
''You step out on to the deck, where there is an eerie, humid calm. There is a thought in the heart of every addict. It is universal, but we all think it’s unique to just us. It is: “I am no damn good.” Every rich person has a secret thought at their centre too, and now that I think about it the two must be related. You reach for it here for comfort. It is: “The next thing I get will make me happy.”
Beneath the boat, and stretching out for miles on every side, there floats the monstrous eye of Ry’lleth, the Great UnMaker. The eye is obscene, unblinking, and the unique black of arterial blood. You would have said, if you didn’t know better, that it regarded you with something like pity.''
