More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Stephen Fry wrote in The Fry Chronicles that behind ‘the mask of security, ease, confidence and assurance I wear (so easily that its features often lift in to a smirk that looks like complacency and smugness) [is] the real condition of anxiety, self-doubt, self-disgust and fear in which much of my life then and now is lived.’
Alain de Botton’s The Book of Life: ‘We must suffer alone. But we can at least hold out our arms to our similarly tortured, fractured, and above all else, anxious neighbours, as if to say, in the kindest way possible: “I know …”’
Sehnsucht: (noun) An intense yearning for something far-off and indefinable.
Mike Tyson’s trainer once told journalists, ‘The hero and the coward both feel the same thing, but the hero uses his fear … while the coward runs. It’s the same thing, fear, but it’s what you do with it that matters.’
Worry is our default position. I add to this: We humans are the only creatures on the planet who can’t sleep even when we need or want to. I also add this: We are the only creatures with the capacity – nay, propensity – to ponder our inevitable deaths.
