More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He knew he was best appreciated in small doses and at great distances, a fact that bothered him less than he suspected it should.
Weather was a useful excuse for so many things in life. Like air, there was always some of it, even if the quality varied from day to day.
When everything looks perfectly right about a person, there’s usually something significantly wrong. They were probably in their early thirties, that awkward age when people still believe they matter and that life is going to go their way.
Men’s obsessions with their own masculinity were embarrassingly effeminate.
He thought of the attainment of self-esteem as similar to aging with dignity—impossible but worth striving for nonetheless.
She and her husband were wine connoisseurs, which is to say, incipient alcoholics with money.
She’d had the misfortune of being talented and capable in many areas without being expert in any of them. This, he’d noted, makes one interesting when young but usually, when middle-aged, disappointed. Or a teacher.
Sometimes Julie wondered if these enterprises weren’t just ways to keep people busy and distracted while villains dismantled the middle class.
Julie had always believed that even if it’s the big, unexpected events (good and bad) that make life memorable and occasionally exciting, it’s the small, predictable routines that hold life together and make it worth living.
Accuracy was beside the point lately anyway. Among a certain segment of the population, acknowledging the existence of scientific data was considered unpatriotic, akin to acknowledging the existence of gun violence unless perpetrated by Muslims or racism that didn’t involve a white person losing a job to a person of color.
All couples start off as Romeo and Juliet and end up as Laurel and Hardy.
Among the many hypocrisies of the “religious” was the fact that they viewed god as omnipotent, but treated Him like a ventriloquist’s dummy by putting their words and crackpot beliefs, prejudices, and unfounded biases into His mouth whenever it suited their purposes.
