More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
We give those we love nicknames, because love requires a word that belongs to us alone.
Some people accept that they will never be free of their anxiety, they just learn to carry it. She tried to be one of them. She told herself that was why you should always be nice to other people, even idiots, because you never know how heavy their burden is.
People want to be good. Deep down. Kind. The problem, of course, is that it isn’t always possible to be kind to idiots, because they’re idiots.
‘Thanks for that, you’re a real tonic. You’re like a self-help book, only in reverse.’
Nothing is easier for people who never do anything themselves than to criticize someone who actually makes an effort.
They say that a person’s personality is the sum of their experiences. But that isn’t true, at least not entirely, because if our past was all that defined us, we’d never be able to put up with ourselves. We need to be allowed to convince ourselves that we’re more than the mistakes we made yesterday. That we are all of our next choices, too, all of our tomorrows.
We have all of this in common, yet most of us remain strangers, we never know what we do to each other, how your life is affected by mine.
