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Kindle Notes & Highlights
There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.
As Sam often said to Sadie, “Why make anything if you don’t believe it could be great?”
“Will she be okay?” Sam said. “I think so,” Anna said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. She would be okay. Dead was okay.
We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life that you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn’t chosen.
Throughout his life, Sam had hated being told to “fight,” as if sickness were a character failing. Illness could not be defeated, no matter how hard you fought, and pain, once it had you in its grasp, was transformational.
Computers are great for experimentation, but they’re bad for deep thinking.”
As I am dabbling in reading Deep Work from Cal Newport and questioning my decisions about my career in tech, this resonated with me deeply and furthered my thinking and reasoning about what’s not working for me at the moment.
The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets.
The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.
How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But then, weren’t all lives that way? Who could say, in the end, that they had chosen any of it?
“There must be more to life than working and swimming and playing Go.” “The boredom you speak of,” Alabaster said. “It is what most of us call happiness.”
She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does.
You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.
