fiefoe

Intensity of undergrad friendships can rival love affairs, with disastrous consequences to match.

In short, my own fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good.
the deft lines of nose and jaw
they were intrigued by even the most mundane of my habits:

And always, always, that same toast. Live forever.
epicene faces as clear, as cheerful and grave, as a couple of Flemish angels.
the variations and counterpoint of falsehood (the twins’s unblinking carelessness striking a bright true note against Bunny’s tomfoolery, or Henry’s bored irritation at rehashing a trivial sequence of events)
He sailed through the world guided only by the dim lights of impulse and habit,
they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world.
“Tell him about the ice cream.” “Really, this was the last straw,” Henry said crossly.
(Rather in the way that the Roman Empire continued in a certain fashion to run itself even when there was no one left to run it and the reason behind it was entirely gone, much of this routine remained intact even during the terrible days after Bunny’s death.
doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college;
“Wasn’t that your assignment?” “Oh, Donne,” Bunny had said scoffingly. “I don’t want to drag him into this.”
He glanced up at the hole in the ceiling. “Yes,” he said brusquely. “Not unlike the Pantheon.”
How was it that a complex, a nervous and delicately calibrated mind like my own, was able to adjust itself perfectly after a shock like the murder, while Bunny’s eminently more sturdy and ordinary one was knocked out of kilter?
it was brilliant at its heart: if anything could be relied upon with almost mathematical certainty, it was that Bunny, at any given meal, would somehow manage to eat almost twice as much as anyone else.
it follows that the logical trail can be picked up at point X and followed back to us. Reason is always apparent to a discerning eye. But luck? It’s invisible, erratic, angelic. What could possibly be better, from our point of view, than allowing Bunny to choose the circumstances of his own death?”
“Well, if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o’clock, you hardly think what you’re going to feed the corpse for dinner.” “Asparagus is in season,” said Francis helpfully.
I marvel at how detached it is in viewpoint, eccentric in detail, largely devoid of emotional power.
“When you’re worried about something,” said Henry abruptly, “have you ever tried thinking in a different language?”
in spite of myself I laughed. There was a tradition among the ancients that things were very cheap in Hell.
he did not wish to see us in our entirety, or see us, in fact, in anything other than the magnificent roles he had invented for us: genis gratus, corpore glabellus, arte multiscius, et fortuna opulentus—smooth-cheeked, soft-skinned, well-educated, and rich.