“…everyone had his or her own peculiar way of dealing with the completely undealable.”

Nova Jacobs, The Last Equation of Isaac Severy

Context: Philip is thinking about how him and his wife dealt so differently with their loss.

I really liked this line because it sums up so clearly for me the person that Philip is. He cannot understand the way others deal with the “completely undealable” and so he thinks of it as peculiar, but at the same time he recognizes that his own methods are peculiar to others.

And that’s the thing, isn’t it? Everyone else’s motives and actions are “peculiar” to us as long as we can’t relate, but it doesn’t mean it is actually peculiar.