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Kindle Notes & Highlights
When you were angry about something, you couldn’t at the same time be crushingly sad about it, which was a blessing.
Like a ghastly rapid river / Through the pale door / A hideous throng rush out forever / And laugh—but smile no more.’ A few lines from Poe. Don’t use the key, Jeffrey. Don’t open the pale door.”
Her smile was all the reward he ever wanted.
What he promised her was reckless, a wild-heart imprudence that simultaneously gladdened and disquieted, that was brewed in the cauldron of parental love.
If a man can’t understand a monster’s suffering, then he’s something of a monster himself.
“The mind and the heart—intellect and emotions, facts and feelings. They’re both important. But to live well, we need to make decisions based on logic and reason modified by emotion. If we’re guided only or even largely by emotion . . . Well, the heart often wants what it doesn’t really need, and sometimes it wants what it shouldn’t have, something with the potential to ruin your life. It wants something so intensely that we find it easy to do what the heart wants even if we know it’s reckless.”
The relationship between a father and daughter was humongously complex, as delicate as it was strong, in some ways as unsettling as it was wonderful.
If every life was a tree of, say, a billion branches, more being added all the time until you were at last dead in all timelines, then perhaps it was not the way you lived just one life that mattered; instead, perhaps it was the shape and beauty of your spiritual oak, the full pattern of all your lives, on which judgment was passed.
Oz was always right here, if unseen, waiting only for a tornado or a megabillion-dollar device to be made manifest.
sometimes you could want a thing too fiercely. The excessive passion of your yearning could blind you to the mistakes you made, so that in the end, you were defeated by the sheer power of your need.
Maybe like they’ve been hunting another you, you’ve been hunting another them.
Love was not an act of reason, but a leap of faith, a belief that some mysterious meaning must lie behind existence and that two particular lives were fated to be one; love was an expression of trust in the truth of the heart’s yearning and the mind’s keen intuition.
