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Kindle Notes & Highlights
“I want my wife to intimidate me. I want to know that her enemies will all fall before her. That’s the kind of woman I want by my side. She had better be intimidating.”
“Look at it from their perspective. It would be exhausting if everyone who was white kept asking you things like ‘where are you from?’ and ‘how did you get here?’ Nobody ever asks you that, Mr. Wilderhampsher, and you’re not actually from Wedgeford.”
thought I was being very helpful. Doesn’t that ‘just one room’ thing only happen in stories?”
“Look at you,” Jeremy said in awe. “With your full sentences and your conjugated verbs. I am in awe of your cognitive capacity.”
She imagined her fears of frailty and abandonment as a heavy, spiked ball deep inside her. But she’d dealt with fears before. She thanked them for keeping her safe, acknowledged them for the work they had done in bringing her to this moment. And then she imagined taking that spiked ball out of her, holding it out as if it were a dandelion puff…and blowing all that fear away, to scatter in the wind.
This reminds me of mindfulness-based stress reduction, at least with the acknowledging a thought and examining it without judgement before letting it go.
“It’s not foreign. That sauce was fermented here, with yeasts found in Wedgeford. The idea came from here. It was made here. If tea is British, this sauce is British. If this sauce is British, I am British, and my wife is British, and my children will be British. I need not change myself to belong. I already belong; it is the rest of England that is out of step.”
