“What he felt toward these kids walking across the grass while he sat on the steps smoking wasn’t quite hate or resentment. There was too much self-loathing mixed into his feelings for that. It requires more self-respect to hate and resent, it takes some self-confidence to believe that they’ve been blessed and you’ve been gypped by a capricious universe. No, Peter mostly blamed himself. He’d started the game on Go with two hundred dollars, same as anyone else, but had bungled it through bad moves and reckless investments. How do other people do it? How do other people navigate the world so easily, as if they already know the way, and never feel unmoored, lost, frantic, like their compasses have been fucked up from too much holding a magnet under them to watch the needle spin and spin, searching for a north that seems to be everywhere at once?”
—Benjamin Hale, “The Minus World”