More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The sun made all the difference.
And none of us ever will be - in this life anyway.
Whatever was fated to happen, it would surely be precious and amazing.
a look he’d seen on thousands of faces during his years as a pastor,
a look that said: Nothing is worth getting excited about; everything is a disappointment.
How many dwellings altogether? Peter couldn’t guess. Maybe five hundred.
she considered the air impure.
weapon.
opportunistic wildlife.
Simile
squeaks and chortles that might be birds or children or machinery.
tense.
sweat
stress.
There wasn’t a hard angle anywhere, nothing sharp or corrugated. It was as though the architect’s aesthetics had been formed in homage to children’s play centers.
Haha simile
Oh, for a spire!
The creature—the person—
The gloves had five digits.
Here was a face that was nothing like a face.
Peter couldn’t decode it on its own terms; he could only compare it to something he knew.
He had to see it as a grotesque pair of fetuses perched on someone’s shoulders, half-shrouded in a cowl. Because if he didn’t allow it to resemble that, he would probably always have to stare at it dumbfounded, reliving the initial shock, dizzy with the vertigo of unsupported falling, in that gut-wrenching instant before a solid comparison is found to clasp onto.
its eyes. His eyes, sorry.
Haha - narrator’s humor
“We are diSappoinPful,” said the Oasan. “And in the Same breath we are graPeful.”
In other words, it’s better than nothing.
Haha - narrator’s humor
Simile
Simile?
“The Book of SPrange New ThingS.”
Well duh
Sooner than you can.
read and read and read unPil we underSPand.
a huge bog of meat that goes on for miles.
Ewww. Simile metaphor
tsunami
Naturally. Other churches too, one presumes
All the fresh water has been fouled. There is not one fully intact, usable building.
Simile - ewww.
He felt grief for the people of the Maldives, but, to his shame, the grief was mingled with a purely selfish pang: the sense that he and Beatrice, for the first time since the beginning of their relationship, were not going through the same things together.
Two kinds of grief - for others and for himself. Not contradictory or selfish at all. Can grief (genuine grief) ever be selfish, in the sense of self-seeking rather than comfort seeking?
Incredible stress: Maldives disaster, sleep-deprived, cat irritating, Mirah social work religious diplomacy, new psych patient, sought food unavailable & what’s left is crap,
Mirah
Muslim social worker,
Kha...
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
Alex Grainger.
Of course she assumes Alex is a man - and Peter doesn’t correct her in his first response. Does he later?
(Very difficult new patient on the ward.
Everything I wanted was out of stock,
What fortunate people we are in our Western playground
Nice
Bible
He should have insisted that they work only as a team.
Smart - a clue has landed.
He considered elaborating on how he felt about the Maldives. But he didn’t feel much, at least not about the Maldives themselves.
His feelings were largely regret—disappointment, even—that the tragedy had affected Beatrice so badly,
