…it’s like he’s opening the covers of a book, but a book that did what books always promised to do and never actually quite did: get you out, really … - Lev Grossman

Never risking anything meant never having or doing or being anything either. Life is risk, it turned out.

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.

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