More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The moral of this story is that sometimes, you can attempt to make all the difference in the world, and it still is like trying to stem the tide with a sieve.
The moral of this story is that no matter how much we try, no matter how much we want it … some stories just don’t have a happy ending.
memory is linked to strong emotion, and that negative moments are like scribbling with permanent marker on the wall of the brain.
Negative moments get remembered. Traumatic ones get forgotten, or so warped that they are unrecognizable, or else they turn into the big, bleak, white nothing I get in my head when I try to focus on that night.
I’m the princess in an ivory tower, except every brick is made of history, and I built this prison myself.
When someone leaves you once, you expect it to happen again. Eventually you stop getting close enough to people to let them become important to you, because then you don’t notice when they drop out of your world.
What is interesting is that elephants can accurately and reliably figure out who is friend and who is foe. Compare this to us humans, who still walk down dark alleys at night, fall for Ponzi schemes, and buy lemons from used-car salesmen. I’d think, given all those examples, the question isn’t whether elephants can remember. Maybe we need to ask: What won’t they forget?
But I know there are two ways to live: Jenna’s way, where you hang on to what you have in a death grip so you don’t lose it; or my way, where you walk away from everything and everyone that matters before they can leave you behind. Either way, you’re bound to be disappointed.
“I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room—but eventually, you learn to live with it.”
What I think is that there is no perspective in grief, or in love. How can there be, when one person becomes the center of the universe—either because he has been lost or because he has been found?
