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I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life.
As Nora escaped the shop, she wished there were nothing but doors ahead of her, which she could walk through one by one, leaving everything behind.
You get near a black hole and the gravitational pull drags you into its bleak, dark reality.
Happy moments can turn into pain, given time.
Nora was only able to think of herself in terms of the things she wasn’t.
‘To fear love is to fear life, and those who fear life are already three-parts dead’.
This was the life she had been in mourning for. This was the life she had beaten herself up for not living. This was the timeline she thought she had regretted not existing in.
She had shrunk for him, but he still hadn’t found the space he needed.
I have carefully calculated that the pain of me living as the bloody disaster that is myself is greater than the pain anyone else will feel if I were to die.
‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely.
I just wanted you to say his name, so that you would feel something.’
Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.’
sometimes the only way to learn is to
that you can choose choices but not outcomes.
Regrets don’t leave. They weren’t mosquito bites. They itch for ever.
As if there was a very thin path to a happy life and it was the path he had decided for her.
‘If you aim to be something you are not, you will always fail. Aim to be you. Aim to look and act and think like you. Aim to be the truest version of you. Embrace that you-ness. Endorse it. Love it. Work hard at it. And don’t give a second thought when people mock it or ridicule it. Most gossip is envy in disguise. Keep your head down. Keep your stamina.
success isn’t something you measure, and life isn’t a race you can win.
I wanted to be somewhere he had never been. I wanted somewhere where I didn’t have to feel his ghost.
Almost everything she had done in her life, she realised – almost everything she had bought and worked for and consumed – had taken her further away from understanding that she and all humans were really just one of nine million species.
She had thought, in her nocturnal and suicidal hours, that solitude was the problem. But that was because it hadn’t been true solitude. 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.
the more people were connected on social media, the lonelier society became.
human beings were wired to know only a hundred and fifty people,
In the face of death, life seemed more attractive,
maybe the problem with her root life had partly been its blandness. She had come to imagine mediocrity and disappointment were her destiny.
There was an invisible baton of failure her mother had passed down, and Nora had held it for a long time.
Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make.
whatever those regrets did to our brain, whatever – how would you say? – neurochemical event happened, that confused yearning for death-and-life was somehow just enough to send us into this state of total in-between.’
And as God is probably someone we can’t see or comprehend then He – or She – or whichever pronoun God is – becomes an image of someone good we have known in our lives.
Gestalt psychology. About how human brains take complex information about the world and simplify it,
‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’
Being aware that everything that could possibly happen happened to her somewhere, in some life, kind of absolved her a little from decisions.
It seems that you have spent all your life saying things that you aren’t really thinking. This is one of your barriers.’
You can have everything and feel nothing.
Was this what fame was like? Like a permanent bittersweet cocktail of worship and assault?
‘There are patterns to life . . . Rhythms. It is so easy, while trapped in just the one life, to imagine that times of sadness or tragedy or failure or fear are a result of that particular existence. That it is a by-product of living a certain way, rather than simply living. I mean, it would have made things a lot easier if we understood there was no way of living that can immunise you against sadness. And that sadness is intrinsically part of the fabric of happiness. You can’t have one without the other. Of course, they come in different degrees and quantities. But there is no life where you
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excellence was never an accident. That excellent outcomes were the result of ‘the wise choice of many alternatives’.
She realised that she hadn’t tried to end her life because she was miserable, but because she had managed to convince herself that there was no way out of her misery.
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.
In becoming everyone, you are becoming no one. You are forgetting your root life. You are forgetting what worked for you and what didn’t. You are forgetting your regrets.’
Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”’
You could eat in the finest restaurants, you could partake in every sensual pleasure, you could sing on stage in São Paulo to twenty thousand people, you could soak up whole thunderstorms of applause, you could travel to the ends of the Earth, you could be followed by millions on the internet, you could win Olympic medals, but this was all meaningless without love.
And when she thought of her root life, the fundamental problem with it, the thing that had left her vulnerable, really, was the absence of love.
There was a net of love to break her fall.
You don’t exist because of the library; this library exists because of you.
She had to want the life she always thought she didn’t.
It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy.
It was interesting, she mused to herself, how life sometimes simply gave you a whole new perspective by waiting around long enough for you to see it.
don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’
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.
