More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. But once you sense that vastness, once something reveals it, hope emerges, whether you want it to or not, and it clings to you as stubbornly as lichen clings to rock.
Nature\vastness\hope\will to live
Maybe that’s what all lives were, though. Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty. Maybe that was the only meaning that mattered. To be the world, witnessing itself. Maybe it wasn’t the lack of achievements that had made her and her brother’s parents unhappy, maybe it was the expectation to achieve in the first place. She had no idea about any of it, really. But on that boat she realised something. She had loved her parents more than she ever
...more
Trying out her pbilosophy of life.
And in doing so, she imagined what it was like to be free.
Freedom.
Gestalt psychology. About how human brains take complex information about
Quantum physics, multiverses, Schrodinger's cat, a philosophy major who has to create her own philosophy to find the will to live. What could be better???? From nihilism to paralell worlds!!!
‘But you will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life,’ he said, wisely. ‘You’re quoting Camus.’
Camus
I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.
Camus
‘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
...more
Gaining insight
Why want another universe if this one has dogs? Dogs are the same here as they are in London.
Genius quote by an unlikely character named Dylan. Whats not to love????
Never trust someone who is willingly rude to low-paid service staff –
True
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.
Aha!
‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’
The meaning of life is not life. Life is alive. Meaning is an idea, an ideal, imaginary...a fantasy.
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see. *
Seems to be the theme of this tale.
‘I don’t want to die.’
Scrooge????? Dickens????
I don’t want to die. She had to try harder. She had to want the life she always thought she didn’t. Because just as this library was a part of her, so too were all the other lives. She might not have felt everything she had felt in those lives, but she had the capability. She might have missed those particular opportunities that led her to become an Olympic swimmer, or a traveller, or a vineyard owner, or a rock star, or a planet-saving glaciologist, or a Cambridge graduate, or a mother, or the million other things, but she was still in some way all those people. They were all her. She could
...more
Its a wonderful life.
I AM ALIVE.
Research I AM. jesus in the book of John. Some philosopher. Life as a verb not a noun. A state of being. I am a verb.
‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’
Theme
‘Well, that’s the beauty, isn’t it? You just never know how it ends.’
Beautiful ending...beginning.
