"You're not a failure," she told him one day. "No. You're not even embittered. Not like one of those East Europeans, people like Cioran and the rest. You're just unlucky. Like someone... like someone who..." (she was searching for the word and he was wild with gratitude: she's understood me, I'm not a professional failure!)---"That's it. You're like an undetonated shell with its devastating power intact. You're an explosion still waiting to be heard."
Andrei Makine from The Life of an Unknown Man