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‘The only way to learn is to live.’
And we have all these metrics that we try and reach. When really success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win.
Grief is a bastard.
Places are places and memories are memories and life is fucking life.’
‘If one advances confidently,’ Thoreau had written in Walden, ‘in the direction of his dreams, and endeavours to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.’
She was as still as the permafrost she stood on.
And that was the problem. In the face of death, life seemed more attractive,
And she knew then, more than she’d known anything, that she wasn’t ready to die.
To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live.
Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person.
But on that boat she realised something. She had loved her parents more than she ever knew, and right then, she forgave them completely.
The life of a human, according to the Scottish philosopher David Hume, was of no greater importance to the universe than that of an oyster.
There was purpose. There was meaning.
she imagined what it was like to be free.
To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’ he said, wisely.
‘Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the one less travelled by, / And that has made all the difference
That excellent outcomes were the result of ‘the wise choice of many alternatives’.
possibility is the basis of everything.
‘Never underestimate the big importance of small things.’
Nora wanted to live in a world where no cruelty existed, but the only worlds she had available to her were worlds with humans in them.
It felt nice – comforting, solidifying – to be a good person.
‘Compassion is the basis of morality,’
Maybe it was the basis of life too.
God Only Knows What We’ll Be Without You.
He was a good person, and good people were rare.
It was one of life’s rules – Never trust someone who is willingly rude to low-paid service staff
He seemed like he would be able to sit in a field near Chernobyl and marvel at the beautiful scenery.
Nora had always imagined she liked the smell of dog, but she suddenly realised there was a limit to this fondness.
passive-aggressive silence,
we-no-longer-have-anything-to-say silence,
The silence of not needin...
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undoing regrets was really a way of making wishes come true.
It seemed the more lives she lived, the harder it was to feel at home anywhere.
‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’
Nora had slowly got used to the peculiar.
as natural as a pearl in a shell.
you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality.
‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
some truths were just impossible to see.
fear of what she was feeling. Love.
the terrifying power of caring deeply and being cared for deeply.
net of love to break her fall.
Never underestimate the big importance of small things,
You must always remember that.
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.
‘Things will get better, Nora. It’s going to be all right.’
A beautiful messy struggle.
A truth that was the beginning and seed of everything possible.
