More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
To feel that his life has been preserved somewhere and not forgotten, gathered around him, packed protectively around him
happened. A kind of death you survive out of politeness, respect for others, out of selfless love.
Most women ultimately very likeable individuals. Men, as everyone knows, disgusting.
Had believed once that life must lead to something, all the unresolved conflicts and questions leading on towards some great culmination. Curiously underexamined beliefs like that, underpinning his life, his personality. Irrational attachment to meaning. All very well as far as it goes, the question of constitutionality arises, and so on. Couldn’t go to work in the morning if he didn’t think something meant something meant something else. But what is it all leading up to. An end without an ending.
People get to know each other, things happen, that’s life. The question for Ivan is how to become one of those people, how to live that kind of life.
the human body heavy, depressingly specific, making no sense at all. It just does things: no one knows why.
Peter is the kind of person who goes along the surface of life very smoothly. He talks on the phone a lot and eats in restaurants and says that schools of philosophy have been refuted.
giving it a minute ago, is often repetitive, often trapped in a familiar cycle of unproductive thoughts, which in Ivan’s case are usually regretful in nature.
A word with blood running through it, a red word.
In casual conversation it’s better to use words that are grey or beige.
It makes me depressed when I think about it. You have all these dreams that you’re going to keep getting better and better. And then in reality you just start getting worse, and you don’t even understand why.
It’s true, you can drive yourself crazy thinking about different things you could have done in the past.
you can drive yourself crazy thinking about these things. The other lives you could have had.
And yet, accepting the premise, allowing life to mean nothing for a moment, doesn’t it simply feel good to be in the arms of this person?
And what if life is just a collection of essentially unrelated experiences? Why does one thing have to follow meaningfully from another?
She has been contained before, contained and directed, by the trappings of ordinary life. Now she no longer feels contained or directed by these forces, no longer directed by anything at all. Life has slipped free of its netting. She can do very strange things now, she can find herself a very strange person. Young men can invite her into holiday cottages for sexual reasons. It means nothing. That isn’t true: it means something, but the meaning is unfamiliar.
Then on a purely human interpersonal level she feels hurt and rejected by his coldness, maybe.
It can be exploitative to give money; also to take it.
The meaningless lives people live.
Remembering something embarrassing you did years ago and abruptly you think: that’s it, I’m going to kill myself. Except in his case, the embarrassing thing is his life.
To go on like this, just for the sake of other people, and anyway who.
Principle of her life, practically: to demand nothing of anyone.
Her all-destroying pain.
Final agonies. Inevitability of death. Meaningless existence, false scaffold of morality assembled around nothing. The final permanent nothing that is the only truth.
Don’t wreck your life for this girl.
How often in his life he has found himself a frustrated observer of apparently impenetrable systems,
And now his dad is gone,
the long-term consequences of seeing someone again who you like very much, who doesn’t really hand on heart seem to like you in the same way, while unrelatedly you’re still grieving and feeling distraught about a recent death in your family, those consequences could be pretty bad, devastating even, in the long term, if you got to like her more and more and she understandably, due to your bad personality and looks, did not experience the same thing on her side. A lot of negative feelings could follow on from that: sadness, low self-esteem, anger at yourself and the other person, despair. People
...more
But I’m very happy that I met you. And even knowing that you’re alive, I feel like my life will be a lot better.
Just being able to remember – being with you, and having such a nice experience together. I don’t mean that in a weird way.
Better for both of them if he.
Owner of nothing in the world but her own perfect body.
he wakes up with every morning, wishing he was dead, fear of losing her, both of them.
That makes her so important, he thought, just because she’s going to have a baby? Isn’t the wealthy global north overpopulated already? And how can feminists say they want equality, if what they really want is to be considered biologically more important than men? Feminists, it seemed to Ivan, were campaigning for a world in which men, far from being equal citizens, in fact had to give up their seats on public transport whenever any random woman decided to get pregnant, which happened constantly.
He remembered then about the unpaid invoice, about the rent due at the end of next week, the graduate jobs he had seen listed on the website, the opening theory he hadn’t studied, the eulogy he hadn’t given at his father’s funeral, and then, before his thoughts could sink down any more deeply into debilitating dark regret and misery, he thought about Margaret.
Nonetheless, it is better to feel hopeful and optimistic about one’s life on earth while engaged in the never-ending struggle to pay rent, than to feel despondent and depressed while engaged in the same non-optional struggle anyway.
To have ideals, it just means to be motivated by something other than your own self-interest.
the desire to win all the time, and also the naive youthful belief that it would be possible to live such a life, now soured by experience.
say something about Peter that when Ivan actually was a child, the two of them were good friends, but when Ivan became a thinking person with his own individuality, Peter didn’t like him or want to spend time with him anymore.
The miracle of existing completely together in this way for even one moment on God’s earth, she thinks. If never again in her life another, only to be here now, with him.
Now he thinks he probably has been too hard on himself, which isn’t at all what his dad would have wanted. No: his dad loved him, and wanted him to be happy, he knows that. And if he can be happy now, it’s not betraying his dad’s memory, as he has sometimes felt, but in fact abiding by his strongest wishes, his wishes for his children’s happiness.
It was the last thing they said to each other before he died, I love you. A different kind of love, obviously, completely different, and yet the words are the same, with something of the same meaning.
Didn’t human sexuality at its base always involve a pathetic sort of throbbing insecurity, awful to contemplate?
Drops by Sylvia’s office with coffee, sits there complaining about work, the dog, Ivan, union meetings, tax deadlines, judges, landlords, the demoralising idiocy of various named individuals. Stop, you’re terrible. How am I wrong? Feeling he gets when one of her colleagues puts their head round the door, asking for something, and he’s sitting with her, the two of them bickering together. What is that: to be witnessed, yes.
The will to survive, appetite for life itself.
You don’t want me to be grateful, you just want me to be happy, she repeats. I’m actually touched by that, like emotionally.
I’m on your side. I know I’ve never done anything to help you, Ivan, but in principle, in spirit. I’ve been on your side all along.

