More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
To make a thing as simple as an apple pie, you have to create the whole wide world.
To be clear: I don’t believe in fate. But I’m desperate.
Irene loves her job. More than loves it—needs it. It’s almost the sole human contact she has. It’s the only thing keeping her total and desperate loneliness at bay.
In Korea, the family name came first and told the entire history of your ancestry. In America, the family name is called the last name. Dae Hyun said it showed that Americans think the individual is more important than the family.
Names are powerful things. They act as an identity marker and a kind of map, locating you in time and geography. More than that, they can be a compass.
Don’t let you pride get the better of you, Tasha.
Words, Natasha thinks, should behave more like units of measure. A meter is a meter is a meter. Words shouldn’t be allowed to change meanings. Who decides that the meaning has changed, and when? Is there an in-between time when the word means both things? Or a time when the word doesn’t mean anything at all?
I’m going to do whatever the world tells me to. I’m going to act like I’m in a goddamn Bob Dylan song and blow in the direction of the wind. I’m going to pretend my future’s wide open, and that anything can happen.
EVERYTHING HAPPENS FOR A REASON. This is a thing people say. My mom says it a lot. “Things happen for a reason, Tasha.” Usually people say it when something goes wrong, but not too wrong. A nonfatal car accident. A sprained ankle instead of a broken one.
People say these things to make sense of the world. Secretly, in their heart of hearts, almost everyone believes that there’s some meaning, some willfulness to life. Fairness. Basic decency. Good things happen to good people. Bad things only happen to bad people.
It’s still hard for me to believe that my future is going to be different from the one I’d planned.
After a while, Samuel wasn’t sure which would last longer: himself or his dreams.
Sure, I can be a little dramatic, but that’s what it feels like. This train is a Magic Fucking Train speeding me from childhood (joy, spontaneity, fun) to adulthood (misery, predictability, absolutely no fun will be had by anyone). When I get off I will have a plan and tastefully groomed (meaning short) hair. I’ll no longer read (or write) poetry—only biographies of Very Important People. I’ll have a Point of View on serious subjects such as Immigration, the role of the Catholic Church in an increasingly secular society, the relative suckage of professional football teams.
There’s a pure kind of joy in the certainty of belief. The certainty that your life has purpose and meaning. That, though your earthly life may be hard, there’s a better place in your future, and God has a plan to get you there. That all the things that have happened to him, even the bad, have happened for a reason.
I could spend all day here. If today were not Today, I would spend all day here. But I don’t have the time or the money.
no one can put a price on losing everything. And another thing: all your future histories can be destroyed in a single moment.
But I have a strange and happy feeling that I can’t quite describe. It’s like knowing all the words to a song but still finding them beautiful and surprising.
My type is girls. All of them. Why would I limit my dating pool?
“How come mothers are always the ones most blamed for screwing up children? Fathers screw kids up perfectly well.”
“All dictators think they’re benevolent. Even the ones holding machetes.”
“I don’t know what I want,” I say.
“This isn’t destiny. I chose this career. It didn’t choose me. I’m not fated to be a data scientist. There’s a career section in the library at school. I did research on growing fields in the sciences, and ta-da. No fate or destiny involved, just research.”
“Are we really supposed to know what we want to do for the rest of our lives at the ripe old age of seventeen?” “Don’t you want to know?” she asks. She’s definitely not a fan of uncertainty. “I guess? I wish I could live ten lives at once.”
“We have big, beautiful brains. We invent things that fly. Fly. We write poetry. You probably hate poetry, but it’s hard to argue with ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate’ in terms of sheer beauty. We are capable of big lives. A big history. Why settle? Why choose the practical thing, the mundane thing? We are born to dream and make the things we dream about.”
“Hope” is the thing with feathers. I understand concretely what that means now. Something inside my chest wants to fly out, wants to sing and laugh and dance with relief.
Besides, I’m tired of worrying. I know that what she said is not a guarantee. But I need to feel something other than resigned dread. Hope seems like a good substitute.
“Come on,” I say. “Tragedy is funny.” “Are we in a tragedy?” he asks, smiling broadly now. “Of course. Isn’t that what life is? We all die at the end.”
Maybe part of falling in love with someone else is also falling in love with yourself.
Normally I would give up, but not today.
Nothing is ever universal.
I love how simple this is for her. I love that her solution to everything is to tell the truth. I struggle with my identity and she tells me just to say what’s true.
“Maybe he was just saying that we should live in the moment. As if today is all we have.”
“There is nothing wrong with having dreams. I may be a stupid dreamer, but at least I have them.”
Life is just a series of dumb decisions and indecisions and coincidences that we choose to ascribe meaning to.
I open my mouth to ask for more facts and specifics. I find them reassuring. The poem comes back to me. “Hope” is the thing with feathers. I close my mouth. For the second time today I’m letting go of the details. Maybe I don’t need them. It would be so nice to let someone else take over this burden for a little while. “Hope” is the thing with feathers. I feel it fluttering in my heart.
I’m just looking for someone to save me. I’m looking for someone to take me off the track my life is on, because I don’t know how to do it myself.
My father is shaped by the memory of things I will never know.
How can this be the same day? How can all these people be going about their lives totally oblivious to what’s been happening to mine? Sometimes your world shakes so hard, it’s difficult to imagine that everyone else isn’t feeling it too.
I just want the music and the moment.
The restless, chaotic feeling is back. I want things that I can name, and some things that I can’t. I want this one moment to last forever, but I don’t want to miss all the other moments to come.
“You know the way we feel right now? This connection between us that we don’t understand and we don’t want to let go of? That’s God.”
“Here’s what I think,” I say. “I think we’re all connected, everyone on earth.” She runs her fingertips over my knuckles. “Even the bad people?” “Yes. But everyone has at least a little good in them.” “Not true,” she says. “Okay,” I concede. “But everyone has done at least one good thing in their lifetime. Do you agree with that?” She thinks it over and then slowly nods. I go on. “I think all the good parts of us are connected on some level. The part that shares the last double chocolate chip cookie or donates to charity or gives a dollar to a street musician or becomes a candy striper or
...more
Everything will be all right, Tasha, she says. We both know that’s more a hope than a guarantee, but I’ll take it nevertheless.
Because everything looks like chaos up close. Daniel thinks it’s a matter of scale. If you pull back far enough and wait for long enough, then order emerges. Maybe their universe is just taking longer to form.
