More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 27 - November 30, 2020
I am not post-apocalypse material. I melt down if they don’t have the shade of fabric I want at Crate & Barrel.
I would like to be Patient 15. Maybe Patient 20. No higher than 50. I don’t want to be Patient Zero, because then everyone would blame me, which is rude.
I am definitely not making it through to fight in the resistance if it involves anything more than retweeting things I agree with.
I am mouthy, and I get easily annoyed, and I don’t know how to shoot a bow and arrow, so dystopias are a solid no from me.
Our government, old, creaky, barely continent, is hard enough to run as it is now. The dystopian government wants to, like, enslave all women or set up a national murder game? We can’t even get single-payer healthcare, so I feel like this is overreaching.
When it all goes south, I want to be remembered, not relied on.
On the one hand, isn’t it everyone’s dream to pack up and move to a new place and find everything they’ve ever hoped for?
“It is easy to see the beginnings of things,” Didion writes in her essay “Goodbye to All That,” “and harder to see the ends.”
But the question comes, for the New Yorker, for the citizen, for the participant, are the things that now seem unbearable the same things that made this place attractive?
her decision to leave was internal and therefore ultimately not about New York as much as about the self. Or New York as a projection of the self. The writer saying, “I am not the romantic I once was.”
That’s New York—terrifying and macabre and hilarious and embarrassing.
the internet I perceived must, at least partly, have been a reflection of what I was putting into it.
But I understand that this place, for all its complexity, for all that it costs, for all that I fear it pulls out of me, is not a place I want to abandon.
There’s something about Whitney Houston’s voice that communicates the inner workings of joy, the thrill of hope, and the exuberance of love.
America is never a set notion; it is an ideal scarred from battle, perceived through smoke.
love is not a respecter of borders.
Things are going to happen, some of them good, a lot of them bad. People will die. People will break your heart. You’ll disappoint people. You’ll disappoint yourself even more. You’ll try things that don’t work. You’ll dare to hope and sometimes that will be rewarded and sometimes it will be mocked.
But we will not go quietly into the night. We will not vanish without a fight! We’re going to live on! We’re going to survive!
At a certain point, you forget where you end and pop culture begins.
You’re exactly who you need to be. Each of you. It may not feel like it; it may seem like it would be much easier being anyone else.
