More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
‘A metaphor, I agree, but don’t treat metaphors lightly – they alter the speaker. The word comes, after all, from the Greek metaphorá, “to transfer”.’
daring to ‘know thyself’ means daring to ‘destroy thyself’. First, we must pull ourselves apart. Then, with the same pieces, we will assemble a new Self. What matters is that you believe in what we’re doing.
There is no feeling of lightness, she thought, like the one that comes after conquering a long-held fear.
Everything about him seemed transitory, evanescent, in motion. No past, no future, only this present moment, already fleeting and gone.
My task is to inject the faithless with a dose of faith and the believers with a dose of scepticism.’
The faces we see in the mirrors are not really ours. Just reflections. We can find our true selves only in the faces of the Other. The absolutists, they venerate purity, we hybridity. They wish to reduce everyone down to a single identity. We strive for the opposite: to multiply everyone into a hundred belongings, a thousand beating hearts. If I am a human, I should be big enough to feel for people everywhere. Look at history. Observe life. It evolves from simplicity to complexity. Not vice versa, that would be devolution.’
The past is a burden. What’s the use of remembering when we can’t change anything?’
The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me, Eckhart says. If I approach God with rigidity, God approaches me with rigidity. If I see God through Love, God sees me through Love. My eye and God’s eye are One.
those who stayed behind, despite the hardships, enjoyed lasting friendships and wider social networks, while the ones who migrated for good remained incomplete, jigsaw puzzles missing a critical piece.
Her memory she treated as a duty, a responsibility that had to be honoured to the very end – even though she sensed that a burden so large could only pull her down someday.
What did Anaïs Nin say? We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.’
Work was a survival instinct.
If you are irritated by every rub, how will your mirror be polished?’
They immediately felt a rapport, as they were both devoted to books and learning and neither embraced the orthodoxy. But they were also very different.’
When we fall in love we turn the other person into our god – how dangerous is that?
‘There’s something about love that resembles faith. It’s a kind of blind trust, isn’t it? The sweetest euphoria. The magic of connecting with a being beyond our limited, familiar selves.
Roles shifted, words never stayed still. The shape of life was a circle, and every point on that circle was at an equal distance from the centre – whether one called that God or something else altogether.
Yet I have also come to learn that for writers and poets for whom national borders and cultural barriers are there to be questioned, again and again, there is, in truth, only one motherland, perpetual and portable. Storyland.
