"Maybe I Only See..."

"Yesterday we had feared a doom we did not know; 

today the doom was known by us all, and feared no less."

 - Robin McKinley

"But does it make any sense at all to know that it ends badly for all of us, even the happiest of us, and that we all lose everything that matters in the end - and yet to know as well, despite all this, as cruelly as the game is stacked, that it's possible to play it with a kind of joy? To try to make some meaning out of all this seems unbelievably quaint. Maybe I only see a pattern because I've been staring too long. But then again, to paraphrase Boris, maybe I see a pattern because it's there. "

 - Donna Tartt, "The Goldfinch"