Because the enormous ...

Because the enormous narcissism of their parents deprived Will and Tom of suitable role models, both brothers learned to identify with absence. Consequently, even if something beneficial fortuitously entered their lives they immediately treated it as temporary. By the time they were teenagers they were already accustomed to a discontinuous lifestyle marked by constant threats of abandonment and the lack of any emotional stability. Unfortunately, "accustomed to" here is really synonymous with "damaged by.
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 Mark Z. Danielewski

Quotes from the same author

Absolutely nothing visible to the eye provides a reason for or even evidence of those terrifying shifts which can in a matter of moments reconstitute a simple path into an extremely complicated one.
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 Mark Z. Danielewski
Maturity, one discovers, has everything to do with the acceptance of ‘not knowing.
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 Mark Z. Danielewski
Anger is one way to respond to fear. I say one way because responses are categorically multiple.
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 Mark Z. Danielewski
Maybe you saw her first? Caught a glimpse between the lines, between the letters, like a ghost in the mirror, a ghost in the wings?
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 Mark Z. Danielewski
At the breakfast table we are footnoting everything that we read. We don't recognise it as such but we encounter an article in the newspaper and then suddenly we recall that a friend had a certain comment on that particular story, a certain bit of news that we saw on the television applies to that and we immediately assemble an idea of a story.
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 Mark Z. Danielewski