Claire Messud Quote

My everyday Appleton life, my phones calls to my father, my occasional beers with friends, my Saturday-morning jobs around the reservoir - what was all that, but the opiated husk of a life, the treadmill of the ordinary, a cage built of convention and consumerism and obligation and fear, in which I'd lolled for decades, oblivious, like a lotus eater, as my body aged and time advanced?