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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“If we get lost in the cellphone dead zone, I plan to be quite passive-aggressive,” Jamie’s mother says. “We’re not lost yet. Still working on it.” Serena starts quoting some Thoreau pomposity about losing yourself in the woods—as if getting lost is intrinsically better in the woods than in a suburban IKEA. The whole concept of “getting lost” implies that at some point we are in fact oriented, which flies in the face of everything Jamie has ever known about people.
(The college has wasted a small fortune on the Quantified Text initiative, using algorithms to identify patterns in classic works of fiction, so nobody actually needs to read them. A total disaster, and now belts are being tightened.)
Each morning, Jamie revels in the abundance of a whole day, stretched out before her—a dozen hours in which to write epic sentences and accomplish great things—and she looks up, and suddenly it’s evening and she’s gotten nowhere. Somehow a month and a half pass without Jamie going anywhere near the schoolhouse.
Everyone says nostalgia is about suffering, because of the Greek algos meaning pain, but Jamie prefers to think of the algia in “nostalgia” as coming from algae. The longing for lost people and places grows at the bottom of your soul, brackish and salty, clogging everything with its endless fronds. Nostalgic people can never want anything cleanly.
Please, she thinks, please, I need to know. I can’t explain this book fully if I don’t know who wrote it. (Yes, yes, Death of the Author, but whatever, context can still matter. Shut up.)
Holy flaming shit, life is full of wonders when you let it open up to you.
She sometimes felt as though happiness was inherently retrospective, like the past could be happy or sad, but the present was always complicated.
I lost my place in the book of fucking life.
Jamie suspects capitalism is a huge part of the reason why magic is so difficult: nobody knows what they want, because we’ve all been brainwashed to want garbage.
