More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
All political careers end in failure. Some careers are long, some are short. Some politicians fail gracefully, and peacefully – others, less so. But beloved or hated, powerful or weak, right or wrong, effective or irrelevant – eventually, eventually, all political careers end in failure.
Change is a slow flower to bloom. Most of us will not see its full radiance. We plant it not for ourselves, but for future generations. But it is worth tending to. Oh, it is so terribly worth tending to.
Just once, he thinks, I would like to think of a solution that does not involve me nearly blowing myself up.
‘What puzzles the dead are,’ says Taty. She looks away into the wilderness. ‘They take so much of themselves with them, you’re not even sure who you’re mourning.
Sometimes I wonder if we’re little more than walking patchworks of traumas, all stitched together.’
‘It’s unfair that the dead leave us,’ she says. ‘But it’s worse that they never really go away.’
My definition of an adult is someone who lives their life aware they are sharing the world with others. My definition of an adult is someone who knows the world was here before they showed up and that it’ll be here well after they walk away from it. My definition of an adult, in other words, is someone who lives their life with a little fucking perspective. – UPPER PARLIAMENT HOUSE MINORITY LEADER TURYIN MULAGHESH, LETTER TO GENERAL ADHI NOOR, 1735
Mulaghesh continues to be The Best.
What a tremendous sin impatience is, he thinks. It blinds us to the moment before us, and it is only when that moment has passed that we look back and see it was full of treasures.
‘A better world comes not in a flood,’ sighs Ivanya, ‘but with a steady drip, drip, drip. Yet it feels at times that every drop is bought with sorrow and grief. It ruins us.’
He recognises that she wants to feel something, anything, besides what she’s feeling. And he does not blame her. He feels the same.
To be a politician is to plan for a reality one might not survive to see.
‘If one were to protest all the injustices of life,’ says Sigrud, ‘great and small, one would have no time for living.’ ‘Using my own words against me. How cruel of you.’
I keep waking up in the night, panicked, and thinking only – what if they’re just like us? What if our children aren’t any better? What if they’re just like us?
Don't think I've ever met a parent who doesn't have these worries sometimes.
‘One evening,’ says Ivanya, ‘does not seem to be enough, Sigrud je Harkvaldsson.’ ‘Yet it was what we got,’ says Sigrud.
A lovely poignant moment that sums up the human experience so terribly well.
