The Midnight Library
Rate it:
Open Preview
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between October 16 - October 17, 2020
31%
Flag icon
‘Librarians have knowledge. They guide you to the right books. The right worlds. They find the best places. Like soul-enhanced search engines.’
46%
Flag icon
The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself.
47%
Flag icon
the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became.
54%
Flag icon
You can be anything you want to be. Because in one life, you are.’
54%
Flag icon
‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’
57%
Flag icon
She realised, in that moment, that she was capable of a lot more than she had known.
58%
Flag icon
She had a fire inside her. She wondered if the fire was to warm her or destroy her. Then she realised. A fire had no motive. Only she could have that. The power was hers.
64%
Flag icon
there is no life where you can be in a state of sheer happiness for ever. And imagining there is just breeds more unhappiness in the life you’re in.’
75%
Flag icon
Fear was when you wandered into a cellar and worried that the door would close shut. Despair was when the door closed and locked behind you.
76%
Flag icon
‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’
95%
Flag icon
‘Life begins,’ Sartre once wrote, ‘on the other side of despair.’
96%
Flag icon
But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
98%
Flag icon
It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.