More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Gretchen had long ago given up trying to understand the motives of people with soft, squishy emotions.
“If you tell the world someone is crazy enough times, the world stops believing them when they say they aren’t,”
A significant percentage of sociopaths passed for normal—they were CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, politicians, defense lawyers, the like. Some didn’t even realize why they never quite fit in, existing on the outskirts, maybe getting fired more often than their peers, maybe ruining a few more relationships than would generally be considered normal. But it was a leap for the average person to add all that up and diagnose themselves as a sociopath. After all, they’d probably never murdered anyone, and that’s what the media and pop culture told people sociopaths did. Psychopaths, on the other
...more
“Genetics loads the gun, environment pulls the trigger,” Gretchen drawled. “You’ve heard me say that.”
The problem with high horses was that the fall was a long way down. She, personally, liked the view from the mud. You didn’t bruise as easily.
“When assessing any given situation, we’re limited to our own experience, logic, or creativity—but there’s a world of causes and effects out there that you simply can’t imagine. Not understanding that is why some people fall into conspiracy theory rabbit holes.”
“Reality is a funny thing, isn’t it?” Daniels said blearily. “There’s no such thing as a true reality because we all see it through our own lens. No two people share the same version of reality. And yet we all seem to just accept that we’re all having the same experience.”
But Gretchen had never believed in good people or bad people, the simple binary options never quite allowing for all the nuance she observed in her world. She also knew that often those who were most immoral thought they were North Stars to be followed. They could justify any sin to themselves and still consider themselves good. Not only good, but above it all.
We need people in our lives who don’t expect us to be anything but what we are.
Soothing empaths took energy she just couldn’t often muster.
Tabby thought about truth and the ways that you could tell stories that were real but were also lies.
If a life was made up of actions and not thoughts, wasn’t it the fact that Gretchen had turned over the gun that mattered, rather than anything that came before that?
