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Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.’
Four letters can reveal the end of a marriage. ‘Your.’ As if they didn’t belong to each other anymore.
‘Grief is the price we pay for love, Ramona. A broken heart in exchange for a whole one.’
He had no team. So they gave him an army.
No one loves men as much as men do,
Politics is an endless series of negotiations and compromises, and even if the processes are often complicated, the foundations are always simple: everyone wants to be paid, one way or another, so most parts of all bureaucratic systems work the same way: give me something, and I’ll give you something. That’s how we build civilizations.
There’s a loser in every relationship. We may not like to admit it, but one of us always gets a little more and one of us always gives up a little more readily.
All the pupils are shipwrecked here, none of them has chosen the company of the others, they’re all just trying to stay alive until the term is over and they can get out of here.
An amazing note and representation of what it does truly feel like to be at school or work and the 'friends' that we have during those times.
It’s hard to care about people. Exhausting, in fact, because empathy is a complicated thing. It requires us to accept that everyone else’s lives are also going on the whole time.
for better or worse: we always define different periods by their worst moments.
The truth about most people is as simple as it is unbearable: we rarely want what is best for everyone; we mostly want what’s best for ourselves.
Violence is the easiest and the hardest thing in the world to understand.
But she didn’t go through it, she’s still going through it. She wasn’t raped, she’s still being raped.
Some people just have a core of sadness.
Our spontaneous reactions are rarely our proudest moments. It’s said that a person’s first thought is the most honest, but that often isn’t true. It’s often just the most stupid. Why else would we have afterthoughts?
‘Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is.’
The complicated thing about good and bad people alike is that most of us can be both at the same time.
Life is a weird thing. We spend all our time trying to manage different aspects of it, yet we are still largely shaped by things that happen beyond our control.