Hal and Orin on the phone about Himself's suicide (p. 253)
I went in and presented with textbook-perfect symptoms of denial, bargaining, anger, still more denial, depression. I listed my seven textbook choices and vacillated plausibly between and among them. I provided etymological data on the word acceptance all the way back to Wyclif and 14th-century langue-d’oc French. The grief-therapist was having none of it.
Context
Hal narrating his grief-therapy ordeal after finding Himself's body: he researched grief the way he researches everything and performed it flawlessly, up to and including the etymology of acceptance back to Wyclif — lexical mastery deployed exactly where feeling should be, and for once failing to pass. The clearest single statement of what the lexical-prodigy identity is for, and of its limit.