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Kindle Notes & Highlights
A thing so triumphantly illogical, so beautifully senseless as an army can’t allow a question to weaken it.
To Adam who was an instrument, who saw not the future farms but only the torn bellies of fine humans,
As with many people, Charles, who could not talk, wrote with fullness.
whose laughter was so constant that everyone near her was glad to be there because it was more fun to be with Dessie than with anyone else.
No one who is young is ever going to be old.
the oldest conviction in the world—that the girl you are in love with can’t possibly be anything but true and honest.
Suddenly he knew joy and sorrow felted into one fabric. Courage and fear were one thing too.
Some of these forces seem evil to us, perhaps not in themselves but because their tendency is to eliminate other things we hold good.
But some men are friends with the whole world in their hearts, and there are others that hate themselves and spread their hatred around like butter on hot bread.”
“Well, a man’s mind can’t stay in time the way his body does.”
When a man says he does not want to speak of something he usually means he can think of nothing else.”
people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen.
maybe this is why people don’t read. They can’t relate/empathize or imagine themselves.
a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting—only the deeply personal and familiar.”
The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime guilt—and there is the story of mankind.
When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.
