Euphoria

by Lily King

Experience, contrary to common belief, is mostly imagination. —Ruth Benedict

—the valued thing is the man, not having one, necessarily, but having the ability to attract one

She watched their young uneasy faces, saw how thin the layer of self-confidence was, how easily it slipped off when they thought no one was looking.

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.

The truth you find will always be replaced by someone else’s.

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.

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’ve always been able to see the savageness beneath the veneer of society.

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

But she was aware that the story you think you know is never the real one.

When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?

The cultures we put in the Northern vector were aggressive, possessive, forceful, successful, ambitious, egoistic. The id of the grid, Nell said. By contrast the Southern cultures were responsive, nurturing, sensitive, empathetic, war-averse. To the West were the Apollonian managers who valued unemotional efficiency, pragmatism, extroversion, while the Easterners were spiritual, introverted seekers, interested in the questions of life more than the answers.