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Such were the humbling effects of love. As they grew older, people distanced themselves from love not so much from a diminishing of passion, the desire to love, as from a dulling of the clear and anguished self-awareness of adolescence, the fear that they were not lovable.
The value of work and hobbies was the easy comfort they provided to lonely people who suffered from not being loved because they were not beautiful or lively. But such people forgot to dream fervently of becoming beautiful or lively in order to be loved.
What was love if it failed to inspire the desire to be worthy of t...
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Loneliness, when it came down to it, was the awareness of your utter lack of influence in the world—knowing that you could and would have zero influence on either your contemporaries or on future generations.
“‘Everyone thinks they should be the star of their own life, and they suffer to achieve stardom.’
‘That which is not esteemed will be forgotten. This is one of the most beautiful laws of humanity.’
the existence of two kinds of memory, for example—declarative memory, the repository of information about facts and events, and nondeclarative memory, the repository of information about physical skills—or how signals from the brain are transmitted through nerves to the fingertips.
