Euphoria

by Lily King

We’re always, in everything we do in this world, she said, limited by subjectivity. But our perspective can have an enormous wingspan, if we give it the freedom to unfurl.

What’s the point of anyone’s search for answers? The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else’s. Someday even Darwin will look like a quaint Ptolemy who saw what he could see but no more.’

has an overenthusiasm for her own ideas and a voluble dearth of enthusiasm for those of others, most especially her teacher’s.”’

It was the first time I had felt alone with them, and it hit me hard and low in the gut. They were here but they belonged to each other and they would go off again and leave me behind.

You don’t realize how language actually interferes with communication until you don’t have it, how it gets in the way like an overdominant sense. You have to pay much more attention to everything else when you can’t understand the words. Once comprehension comes, so much else falls away. You then rely on their words, and words aren’t always the most reliable thing.

But I love without needing to own.

I want too much. I always have.

This mood is glacial, gathers up all the debris as it rolls through:

Always in her mind there had been the belief that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it.

I can see that his complaining is worry.

I am so often the mother, in all my relationships, really. Even

me. I’ve always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society. It’s not so very far beneath the surface, no matter where you go.

Tragedy is based on this sense that there’s been a terrible mistake, isn’t it?’

He said surely it is more civilized to kill one man every few months, hold up his head for all to behold, say his name, and return home for a feast than to slaughter nameless millions.

The impulse to touch her and all the life in her was something I had to check regularly.

culture is not biologically transmitted, and that Western civilization is not the end result of an evolution of culture, nor is the study of primitive societies the study of our origins.

don’t always see how much other people are shaping you.