Kindle Notes & Highlights
“We weep because the only way everything could ever be alright is in fiction. We weep because what we’ve seen can’t be true, no matter how badly we wish it were. We weep at the truth.”
“Any bond between two people is only as strong as the desire of the one who wants it the least.”
Wasn’t to believe that but a way to be arranged? Maybe even the worst kind of arranged? The kind where you think you’re overcoming the arrangement, when, in fact, you’re serving it perfectly? Flipping a covert bird instead of screaming a curse instead of throwing a punch instead of throwing a rock? Revolving in a chair you might have otherwise swung? Cheering for underdogs and calling it action? Smirking at the powerful and calling it subversive? Embracing your meekness instead of getting strong?
Like a guy on a gallows worrying about rope-burn.
I didn’t understand exactly what June was saying, but I decided to believe her because it is dangerous to believe in what you don’t understand, and I thought she was saying she wanted me to be dangerous, and I wanted to be what she wanted me to be.
They are only your lungs in the way that June is your girlfriend, Nakamook your best friend, Judah your father, the Israelites your people: they are only your lungs inasmuch as you are their Gurion. To be yours does not mean you control them. To be theirs does not mean they control you. It only means there is mutual influence. And the more one element influences the other, the more the other influences the one. What you animate animates you back.
We are superior to the angels not because we control ourselves, but because Adonai does not control us.
I said, You’re the one who’s like Jesus, Floyd. “You don’t know anything about Jesus,” Floyd said. I said, I know that by the time he’d gotten himself all covered in spit, he wasn’t able to do much more than talk.
What can I do? I said. “About what?” June said. She held my hand between us by the wrist and stared at it. About what you just told me, I said. About— She bent my fingers back so hard and sudden I knelt. “You can go ahead and fuck off if you ever bring it up again, Gurion. Especially in that whiney, desperate voice,” she said. “We cried and now it’s done so forget about it, or at least act like you have. I didn’t fall in love with you because you were cute. I didn’t fall in love with you because you were sensitive.”
My tears, as usual, were well beside the point.
It was a relief to decide you didn’t have to decide. It was a relief to have faith in immutability, a relief to lose faith in your ability to change something, even when it was something you’d wished you could change. It was a relief to be imposed on intractably. Acceptance, if not brave, was at least a relief. That was the trick of it.
spendy technologists who claim to believe that authorship is just a kind of editing, who confuse DIY with owning an iMac, and artfulness for art,
Were you not a scholar when you began this book, you’ve certainly become one, and you know it in your heart: books are truer than movies; when they are books of scripture, they are truer, even, than what they describe.
anyone can tell his own underdog story. Be wary of underdogs.
