More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Despair leads us to stories, of course. We invent them so we can live in a world with meaning.
a drowning child finding a life raft.
Sometimes we all need a saving grace. Or just someone to offer a sliver of help in times of overwhelming distress
winding his fingers in and out of hers as if to knit them together. If she was truthful, this was the way she’d always wanted him: attentive, absolutely hers, asking if she was okay, bringing her glasses of champagne, exclaiming how beautiful she was in her new green silk dress with the skirt that swung with her every move.
“Telling stories is one of the greatest powers we possess. It’s like a dream you can fill with what you want. And the knight doesn’t always have to save the princess; sometimes she saves herself.”
“The best stories are soul-making. But stories we tell about ourselves, and even the harrowing ones told by others about us, can also be soul-destroying. We have to choose what is good and true, not what will destroy.”
“Sometimes the stars make me feel better, but not tonight.” “How?” he asked. “How do they make you feel better?”
“Maybe because they tell me that there is something more I can’t see. Or if I can see it, I can only see the littlest bit of it when there is much, much more.”
“Or maybe they make me feel better because even though they hide all day, they always come out at night; they don’t go away.”
“What a fairy tale is meant to do,” she said, “if it’s meant to do anything at all, Tolkien says, is give us new perspective in our world, the consolation of a happy ending. A recovery of sorts. Like we leave that world to see ours anew.
“Like when I leave you, and everything is different; or when I’m with you, and it feels like the world and everything in it is alive and for me?”
“You are my fairy tale. You always have been,” he said.
obsession with reasons and explanations, her desperate need to make meaning of the meaningless and sense of the senseless was destroying what she had right here, right now.
“Grief is a terrible gnawing passion that makes us do things we wouldn’t do otherwise.
