“You’re an interesting case,” she said. There is really no end to life’s little humiliations, Quentin reflected. - Lev Grossman

The power to create order is one thing. The power to destroy is another. Always they are in balance. But it is easier to destroy than to create, and there are those whose nature it is to love destruction.

He wondered where this feeling was coming from, that he was improvising his part in a play that everybody else had a script for.

If he couldn’t go back, he would just have to do things differently going forward. He felt how infinitely safer and more sound this attitude was. The trick was just not wanting anything. That was power. That was courage: the courage not to love anyone or hope for anything.
The funny thing about it was how easy everything got, when nothing mattered.