More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
What does it matter, to tell yourself that the thing controlling you comes from outside, if in fact you only experience it inside your own heart? Where can you run from it? How can you hide?
“I’m married, so I know perfectly well that your spouse is the one person who knows all the words you can’t bear to hear.”
It was my firm intention to live forever, so anything less is a disappointment.”
Either last night’s conversation was still going on, or some other neurotic early risers had rejected morning solitude and were chatting away as if dawn were not the dark hour of despair.
decoctions.
obstreperousness.
We have our feelings, we make our decisions, but in the end we look back on our lives and see how sometimes we ignored our feelings, while most of our decisions were actually rationalizations because we had already decided in our secret hearts before we ever recognized it consciously.
reprovingly.
recidivist
epicanthic
gnomic
mantic
I know I’m a shit and I’m not going to change just because you look so downcast.”
I would rather be mocked for doing a good thing than to be respected, knowing I have done wrong.
If one has to say, in an argument, “I am intelligent! I do know things!” then one might as well stop arguing.
epigrams,”
the only people who ever prize purity of ignorance are those who profit from a monopoly on knowledge.”
when a man like Hikari died, a pinch of the ashes from his locket would be added to a bit of his own ashes and given to his children or his grandchildren to wear. Thus all of his ancient family hung above his breastbone, waking and sleeping, and formed the most precious gift he could give his posterity.
hinterland,
hegemony,
dolefully
remonstrate
“We all act because we’re sure of what we want, and we believe that the actions we perform will get us what we want, but we never know anything for sure, and so all our rationales are invented to justify what we were going to do anyway before we thought of any reasons.”
Knowledge is just opinion that you trust enough to act upon.
“Suicide is a desperate attempt to get rid of unbearable agony.
vaunted
I like how you make a virtue out of your desperate ignorance.
“Whenever humans meet foreigners, weak or strong, dangerous or peaceable, the issue of destruction comes up. It’s built into our genes.”
xenophobia.
“Even gentle people recognize that sometimes the decision not to kill is a decision to die.”
“LIFE IS A SUICIDE MISSION”
The trick of it was finding a way to let new things into one’s life without killing that life to accommodate them.
lee
trifle
portend?
diffident,
colloquy
recidivist
pulchritude.”
credulity,
insuperable
superciliousness.
obsequiousness?
imperturbable
begrudge
All her life she had kept her own feelings at such a distance from herself that now she hardly knew how to contain them.
“Everyone dies. Everyone leaves. What matters is the things you build together before they go. What matters is the part of them that continues in you when they’re gone.
Jaci Bates liked this
We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they’re never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.”
“All the stories are fictions. What matters is which fiction you believe.
That’s life. It hurts, it’s dirty, and it feels very, very good.
