I read this book after reading a review in the NYT. The review was actually more of a feature on the author than a review, but the topic seemed intereI read this book after reading a review in the NYT. The review was actually more of a feature on the author than a review, but the topic seemed interesting and he has definitely done good work.
In the end, I didn't love it. I think that the whole "look at us we work at Google that is so hard" thing didn't work for me. Because I know people who work at Google and trust me, there are much harder jobs. I do agree that people in the workplace are too stressed these days and we need to deal with it, I just don't know if I found any novel points in this book to help with that.
The reason for two stars is that the content was pretty good, it just wasn't new to me. (don't think I actually finished this one)
Highlights:
We can usually experience emotions more vividly in the body than in the mind. Therefore, when we are trying to perceive an emotion, we usually get more bang for the buck if we bring our attention to the body rather than the mind.
Meta-attention is also the secret to concentration. The analogy is riding a bicycle. The way you keep a bicycle balanced is with a lot of micro-recoveries. When the bike tilts a little to the left, you recover by adjusting it slightly to the right, and when it tilts a little to the right, you adjust it slightly to the left. By performing micro-recoveries quickly and often, you create the effect of continuous upright balance. It is the same with attention. When your meta-attention becomes strong, you will be able to recover a wandering attention quickly and often, and if you recover attention quickly and often enough, you create the effect of continuous attention, which is concentration.
happiness is not something that you pursue; it is something you allow. Happiness is just being.
Alan Wallace: “Have expectations before meditation, but have no expectation during meditation.”
The classical analogy is ice breaking up on a frozen lake. To a casual observer, the breakup seems like a sudden phenomenon, but it is actually due to a long period of gradual melting of the underlying ice structure. In Zen, we call it gradual effort and sudden enlightenment.
Thoughts and emotions are like clouds—some beautiful, some dark—while our core being is like the sky. Clouds are not the sky; they are phenomena in the sky that come and go. Similarly, thoughts and emotions are not who we are; they are simply phenomena in mind and body that come and go.
Daniel Goleman identifies five emotional competencies under the domain of self-regulation: 1. Self-control: Keeping disruptive emotions and impulses in check 2. Trustworthiness: Maintaining standards of honesty and integrity 3. Conscientiousness: Taking responsibility for personal performance 4. Adaptability: Flexibility in handling change 5. Innovation: Being comfortable with novel ideas, approaches, and information
We have the tendency to feel bad about feeling bad. I call it “meta-distress,” distress about experiencing distress. This is especially true for sensitive and good-hearted people. We berate ourselves by saying things like, “Hey, if I am such a good person, why am I feeling this much envy?”...more
What I enjoyed most about this book is that its point is simple, yet important: people succeed in Silicon Valley / Tech because they are committed toWhat I enjoyed most about this book is that its point is simple, yet important: people succeed in Silicon Valley / Tech because they are committed to a goal above and beyond making money.
I work in the tech industry and we're always hearing about people we know or loosely know making big money by having their companies acquired. But I always ask myself: is that really the end goal? Would you really have sacrificed all of those nights, weekends, blood, sweat, tears, relationships to this company if you thought it would end in a large check and a few years at whatever monolith purchased your little baby?
I think that, for the most part at least, the answer is no. The most successful entrepreneurs are truly committed to a future vision/product/idea that is much much larger than making a few million dollars. That money is real but so few people make it to that point that they need to have a larger motivation to even get started with a company in the first place. Randy Komisar's thesis seems to be that there are various metrics to know if a business might succeed, but ultimately it is the people behind the business that make it a success or not. And those people are qualified based on their "passion" for the business, not their degrees etc.
As an extension of this point, you can make the larger argument that having a "deferred life plan", as Komisar puts it, is crazy. People who go into something they don't love but hope will make them money do it for a real reason: they want to do something else later. I've never understood the types of people who live year after year in a miserable job just to make money and do something cool later. Komisar's point about not putting life off was relatively obvious, but I think it's one more of us need to hear.
Another note on the book is that it was written in 2000 but is surprisingly non-dated. Some of the fake internet businesses he mentions even seem like good ideas to me now!
Favorite bits:
"I suppose it's a privilege of youth to be admired and admonished by the wise guys who have gone before." -p. 19
"VCs, I explained, want to know three basic things: Is it a big market? Can your product or service win over and defend a large share of that market? Can your team do the job?" - p.30
"Don't misunderstand my skepticism. Sacrifice and compromise are integral parts of any life, even a life well lived. But why not do hard work because it is meaningful, not simply to get it over with in order to move on to the next thing?" -p.83
"Passion pulls your toward something you cannot resist. Drive pushes you toward something you feel compelled or obligated to do. If you know nothing about yourself, you can't tell the difference. Once you gain a modicum of self-knowledge, you can express your passion. But it isn't just the desire to achieve some goal or payoff, and it's not about quotas or bonuses or cashing out. It's not about jumping through someone else's hoops. That's drive." -p. 83-84
"Silicon Valley veterans share a tacit understanding that what a startup needs isn't once CEO, but three–each at successive stages of the startup's development. GIven my deep regard for man's best friend, I Tend to think of each in terms of best of breed. The first CEO is 'the Retriever.' From the muck she must assemble the core team, the product or service, and the market direction–all around a coherent vision. She must also raise the money and secure crucial early customers and partners. She is prized for her tenacity and inventiveness. The second CEO is 'the Bloodhound.' He must sniff out a trail–find the market and prove the business. He needs to build an operating team and establish a market beachhead. He is prized for his keen sense of direction and company-building skills. The third CEO is 'the Husky.' She must lead the team, pulling an operating company that grows heavier by the day with people and public company responsibilities. She is prized for he constancy and scalability. None of these, to me, is top dof. All are equal in importance. just different in skills and temperaments." -p. 130
"And then there is the most dangerous risk of all–the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later." -p. 154...more
I read this book on the suggestion of a friend. We were talking about her recent break-up and she referenced the book as if anyone in her right mind wI read this book on the suggestion of a friend. We were talking about her recent break-up and she referenced the book as if anyone in her right mind would have read it, and I had never heard of it. So, I bought it on my Kindle that night expecting to get some romantic wisdom of the ages.
What I found instead was "a total mindfuck", as they say. The book is geared toward women and basically tells us to fake disinterest so men will love us more. I'm sure this strategy works in many cases, but it just didn't sit well with me. I believe there needs to be a strategy in dating just like all parts of life require a strategy, formal or informal. But when the strategy is basically to deceive the other person, it feels wrong.
Also, I told my boyfriend about the book and how it suggests that women always wear make up, even to the gym. For a while, every time we left the house, he would ask "are you wearing make up?" I think he was worried that the book had changed me.
In the end, I thought it was a waste of brain space to finish the book so I stopped about a quarter of the way in.
ps: it is the 803rd most highlighted book on Amazon. Dear Jesus help us women....more
This book was recommended to me after I became absolutely obsessed with grocery shopping in Santiago, Chile. I think it was the hunt, or maybe just thThis book was recommended to me after I became absolutely obsessed with grocery shopping in Santiago, Chile. I think it was the hunt, or maybe just that I had a ton of time, but I went grocery shopping pretty much every day while I lived in Santiago. I found the assortment of foods fascinating and the way they were packaged (mayo in a bag!?) even more-so. I'm also, in general, a very tactile shopper so I was interested in what he'd have to say about that.
My expectation was that this book would be about the psychology of buying. And, in a way, it is. But despite the title, the book is more about the seller side, about what store owners can do to make people buy more things. Perhaps a book entirely about why people consume would be boring because it would all boil down to not having enough love, but I think that this book could have explored that angle more.
Another shortcoming is his analysis of online shopping. He knows that people react this way (he says so in the book) but when Underhill says that online shopping will never overtake retail, I think that he isn't fully aware of the power of technology. I, for one, have been converted to buying my shoes almost exclusively from Zappos. Convenience is king.
What Underhill does go into depth about is why some stores make you want to buy everything (ummm Target, anyone?) and other stores make you run away screaming (for me, Wal-Mart is a great example). Some of it is fairly basic and general, but other bits are unexpected. I especially enjoyed the way he went into detail on how they gather this information. It's like spy work, but much more data collection!
I also liked the international angle near the end of the book. He reminded me of why shopping was so fascinating in Chile: it's just. plain. different.
I would definitely recommend this book because after reading it you will never enter a store and look at it the same way.
Favorite bits:
"butt-brush effect....Shoppers would approach it, stop, and shop until they were bumped once or twice by people heading into or out of the store. After a few such jostles, most of the shoppers would move out of the way, abandoning their search for neckwear." -pg.11
"In some stores buyers spend three or four times as much time as nonbuyers." -pg.32
"more than 60 percent of what we buy wasn't on our list." -pg.47
"Almost no one goes to work empty-handed nowadays. When you think about it, it's a rare moment in the modern American's life when both hands are completely free." -pg.51
"61 percent o the total time someone spends looking at a menu board is done after they've ordered." -pg.68
"Here's another fact about how people move (in retails environments but also everywhere else): They invariably walk toward the right. You don't notice this unless you're looking for it, but it's true–when people enter a store they head rightward. Not a sharp turn, mind you; more like a drift." -pg.78
"Planograms, the maps of which products are stocked where on a shelf, are determined with this in mind: If you're stocking cookies, for instance, the most popular brand goes dead center–at the bull's eye–and the brand you're trying to build goes just to the right of it." -pg.80
"A chair says: we care. Given the chance, people will buy from people who care." -pg.91
"During a series of recent studies, though, we noticed something odd: Around 10 percent of drive-thru customers would get their food and then park right there in the lot and eat in their cars. Curiously, the drivers who did this tended to be in newer cars than the restaurants' average customers." -pg.95
"Eighty-six percent of women look at price tags when they shop. Only 72 percent of men do." -pg.104
"Smart retailers should pay attention. All aspects of business are going to have to anticipate how men's and women's social roles are changing, and the future is going to belong to whoever gets there first. A good general rule: Take any category where women now predominate and figure out how to make it appealing to men without alienating women." -pg.112
"Perhaps the easiest solution would be for women to register their sizes at clothing stores of their liking, then just point their men in the right direction." -pg.114
"What makes women such heroic shoppers? The nature-over-nurture types posit that the prehistoric role of women as homebound gatherers of roots, nuts and berries rather than roaming hunters of woolly mammoths proves a biological inclination toward skillful shopping."
"The promise of technology is always that it will make our lives easier and more efficient. Women are the ones who demand that it fulfill its promise." -pg.133
"By 2025, anything smaller than thirteen-point type will be a form of commercial suicide. Even today, as our vision begins to blur, using nine-point type qualifies as a self-destructive tendency." -pg.140
"Any technology that's located on the floor of a store, and that's accessible to kids, has to be build to combat standards–as if it were headed to Kabul or Bagdad." -pg.160
"Even if we didn't need to buy things, we'd need to get out and touch and taste them once in a while." -pg.178 ...more
This book has a very strong opening chapter but I got a bit bored after that. The statistics about women in the workplace are interestiFirst, the bad:
This book has a very strong opening chapter but I got a bit bored after that. The statistics about women in the workplace are interesting, but they seemed somewhat repetitive. It was nice hearing anecdotes from Sheryl's life, but they sometimes felt a bit forced and in one case the 'personal story' was an urban legend I've hard repeated many times before.
The good:
This is an important topic for people to think about. While Sheryl's thesis isn't new to me, I do think it's an interesting one. Women do often hold themselves back in the workplace. And men hold us back. And we hold each other back. And while there are not easy solutions, it's good to open up a dialog, as they say.
The interesting:
The most interesting points made in this book were, to me at least, about the need for men to be more active in the home. I myself enjoy domestic tasks, but they do take up a lot of time. Sheryl argues that we need to make men take more responsibility with the home and children if we're ever going to have the time to have serious careers. She has some good stats on how men have far fewer responsibilities simply because we don't expect them to participate in home life at the same level as women.
Favorite bits:
"One thing that helps is to remember that feedback, like truth, is not absolute." -p. 83
"Sharing emotions builds deeper relationships. Motivation comes from working on things we care about. It also comes from working with people on things we care about. It also comes from working with people we care about. To really care about others, we have to understand them–what they like and dislike, what they feel as well as think. Emotion drives both men and women and influences every decision we make. Recognizing the role emotions play and being willing to discuss them makes us better managers, partners, peers." -p. 88
"As women become more empowered at work, men must be empowered at home." -p. 108
"Anyone who wants her mate to be a true partner must treat his as an equal–and equally capable–partner. And if that's not reason enough, bear in mind that a study found tha wives who engage in gatekeeping behaviors do five more hours of family work per week than wives who take a more collaborative approach." -p. 109
"Now we know that women can do what men can do, but we don't know that men can do what women can do." -p. 120 (Gloria Steinem)
"It will be a litte messy, but embrace the mess. It will be complicated, but rejoice in the complications. It will not be anything like what you think it will be like, but surprises are good for you. And don't be frightened: you can always change your minds. I know: I've had four careers and three husbands." -p. 125 (Nora Ephron)
"My coworkers should understand that I need to go to a party tonight–and this is just as legitimate as their kids' soccer game–because going to a party is the only way I might actually meet someone and start a family so I can have a soccer game to go to one day." -p.132 (young, single woman quoted)
"Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence." -p. 157
"In the future, there will be no female leaders. There will just be leaders." -p. 172...more
This was one of those books where the first 5 pages were brutal. I re-read them about three times and still had no idea what was going on. The use ofThis was one of those books where the first 5 pages were brutal. I re-read them about three times and still had no idea what was going on. The use of "he" really got me. As it turns out, in any given chapter, "he" refers to the person the chapter is named for...but it took me a while to figure that out.
The writing in this book is definitely good. The descriptions of nature were always incredibly precise and moving. What I did not like about it, however, was that I kept waiting for something to happen. It finally does, on the last page, but up until then I was hoping and praying that something would happen to these characters. One of whom is kind of a lost/depressed city boy and the other a lost/depressed country boy. Both are trying to find their way out of malaise but neither seems to be able to.
I do enjoy how it is told from two different people's perspectives, though. If only I could see real life from two different perspectives...
A frustration I felt throughout the entire book was that the characters have many interesting thoughts but never seem by able to communicate them honestly. In this sense, perhaps the book is all too real to life.
Overall: by the end it was definitely a page turner, but it took real effort to get involved in the story line and I wish something had happened sooner.
Favorite bits of writing:
"He thought that if your life was filled with beginnings, as he had just decided today that his was; and if you were going to stay alive, then there would be vacant moments when there was no breathing and no life, a time separating whatever had gone before from whatever was just beginning. It was these vacancies, he thought, that had to be gotten used to." -pg.8
"...he knew that things in your life didn't disappear once they were begun, and that your life just got thick with beginnings, accrued from one day to the next, until you reached an age or temperament when you couldn't support it anymore and you had to retire from beginnings and let your life finish up on momentum." -pg.15
"There had been a look in Mr. Lamb's face as if be just felt the ballast of his life going off, and couldn't stop it, and an abstraction had come on him for the first time ever and scared him and made him go after cures, which he knew in advance wouldn't work, since he knew there wasn't any way in the world to end it now. Since everything you were lonely for was gone, and everything you were afraid of was all around you." -pg.219
"It was the compromise satisfaction a person got, he thought, when washed up on the beach of some country after spending weeks floating around on a tree limb, too far from home ever to hope to be deposited there, and satisfied to be on land, no matter really which land it happened to be." -pg.225...more
This is a satire, but somehow I liked it much more than Buckley's "Boomsday." I think it is because Buckley was writing a satire of the DC spin machinThis is a satire, but somehow I liked it much more than Buckley's "Boomsday." I think it is because Buckley was writing a satire of the DC spin machine, which I have little inside knowledge of, and Kunkel is writing satire about confused early adulthood, which I have tons of inside knowledge of. It isn't only hilarious, but I scarily identify with a lot of Dwight's philosophizing about the insanity of it all. In the end he somehow achieves clarity through a mixture of drugs and finding purpose. I didn't love that part, but maybe it's because I haven't gotten that far in my life yet so I don't identify.
There are tons of amazing one-liners scattered all throughout this book.
Favorite bits:
"I guess I'd studied French instead because it seemed like the thing I would do." -pg.8
"The regular alliance of happiness with idiocy has always been for me as a happy person one of the world's more painful features." -pg.37
"...the higher standard of living coupledom..." -pg.40
"...the nature of Sunday as that recurrent day whose tremendous potential seems much more enjoyable that any actual use of it could be." -pg.41
"...a genuine preference for one restaurant or another, something that was a crucial skill in New York and evidently an important contemporary venue for personality-expression." -pg.43
"...people who know you have a way of regulating your behavior to make it conform with your incoherent past." -pg.44
"Normally I didn't pay that much attention to New York. It always seemed weirdly pre-perceived, with other people already on the job." -pg.45
"My own sympathies were more with him, if only because in deserving them less he obviously needed them more." -pg.48
"But then solitary people pretending not to be–that must be how many families start up, and how the race of the lonely has grown so numerous." -pg.55
"A cosmopolitan provincialism is the worst." -pg.59
"Better to lie to other people than yourself." -pg.60
"...all of us showed Mister an affection that was plainer and more extravagant than anything that passed between us actual humans except in times of crisis. Yet this attention to Mister seemed also to be the emblem of our basic mutual filial thing, implying as it did what large volumes of love-grade emotion must get trafficked invisible between us if this was how we treated–I mean, nice as he was–our dog. Our feelings for Mister kind of took the measure of our hearts, is my guess." -pg.75
"Sleep is so nice, I thought. Otherwise things would just add up." -pg.103
"'I like preserving our self-image as athletic people,' Alice had said ...'How infrequently do you think we can do sports before we have to admit that we never do?'" -pg.131
"I've detected that many of my thoughts have become swift and super-sure and that's a big part of what happiness is..." -pg.150
"Look I've known people who've known things about the Middle East–and it was never any good." -pg.191...more
This book has a lot of interesting tid bits, but, for me, the concept of "enchantment" didn't really hold it all together. I appreciate that Guy KawasThis book has a lot of interesting tid bits, but, for me, the concept of "enchantment" didn't really hold it all together. I appreciate that Guy Kawasaki's idea was to use a new word (thank god for no more books about 'engagement') but saying that meeting his wife and seeing an apple computer were comparable moments in his life seems silly to me. Also, if a life, such as Guy's, only has a few enchanting moments, it seems that perhaps the bar is too high. As marketers/business people, we can't all be vying for a person's top memory, can we?
That being said, I did learn bits and pieces about persuasion and the book was a painless read.
I especially liked this quote: "In a perfect world, you are so enchanting that your cause doesn't matter, and your cause is so enchanting that you don't matter. My goal is to help you achieve both."
I read this book when I saw the movie was coming out. As usual, there were many important details in the book that were referenced but not fully exploI read this book when I saw the movie was coming out. As usual, there were many important details in the book that were referenced but not fully explored in the movie. It was an emotional, entertaining read. Not something I would recommend as a top book, but good to read on a plane / vacation.
My highlights:
“Life is hard, Pat, and children have to be told how hard life can be.” “Why?” “So they will be sympathetic to others. So they will understand that some people have it harder than they do and that a trip through this world can be a wildly different experience, depending on what chemicals are raging through one’s mind.”
But I’ll tell you the same thing I tell my students when they complain about the depressing nature of American literature: life is not a PG feel-good movie. Real life often ends badly, like our marriage did, Pat. And literature tries to document this reality, while showing us it is still possible for people to endure nobly....more
Before he’d arrived, life at Westish had seemed heroic and grand, grave and essential, like Mike Schwartz. It was turning outHighlights from Kindle:
Before he’d arrived, life at Westish had seemed heroic and grand, grave and essential, like Mike Schwartz. It was turning out to be comic and idle, familiar and flawed—more like Henry Skrimshander.
It astonished and humbled him to think that a mind could grow so rich that its every gesture would come to seem profound.
She’d gotten so far ahead of the curve that the curve became a circle, and now she was way behind.
Locker rooms, in Schwartz’s experience, were always underground, like bunkers and bomb shelters. This was less a structural necessity than a symbolic one. The locker room protected you when you were most vulnerable: just before a game, and just after. (And halfway through, if the game was football.) Before the game, you took off the uniform you wore to face the world and you put on the one you wore to face your opponent. In between, you were naked in every way. After the game ended, you couldn’t carry your game-time emotions out into the world—you’d be put in an asylum if you did—so you went underground and purged them. You yelled and threw things and pounded on your locker, in anguish or joy. You hugged your teammate, or bitched him out, or punched him in the face. Whatever happened, the locker room remained a haven.
A majestic fart propelled him to the top of Section 12, just at the springing of the stadium’s curve.
Science professors, she assumed; the kind of lovably obdurate old men who bicycled everywhere, ate seven small meals a day, and were plotting to live to a hundred twenty. Her dad, though not a habitual swimmer, was a little like that too. At sixty, he seemed no more than halfway finished with this world.
Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering. Most people couldn’t do this alone; they needed a coach. A good coach made you suffer in a way that suited you. A bad coach made everyone suffer in the same way, and so was more like a torturer.
Slovenliness correlated highly with despair—the inability to exert influence over one’s environment, et cetera.
Such consistency suggested, or seemed to suggest, that Owen found their afternoons worth repeating, even down to the smallest detail. This was the dreamy, paradisiacal side of domestic ritual: when all the days were possessed of the same minutiae precisely because you wanted them to be.
In the room of a girl at a place like Westish, the presence of family was almost always palpable, not just in the framed photographs but in the careful replication of a childhood room, updated for post-adolescence; the holdover stuffed animals, the condom box or plastic pastel birth-control wheel left in plain view in tribute to the parent who wasn’t there to object.
victory could make a man magnanimous.
“If I were you I’d ask me out to dinner. I’d put on a nice shirt that matched my eyes and I’d pick me up in my silver Audi and teach me about opera while I drove me out through the dark countryside to some Friday-night fish fry in some little town in the middle of nowhere.” “You don’t eat fish,” Affenlight said. “I know. But I’d be so smitten by the invitation that I wouldn’t care. And then I’d take me to a motel and turn off the heat and crawl into bed with me and watch cable television into the wee hours, the way that consenting adults are sometimes entitled to do, even if they normally detest television. And I’d hold me all night and kiss me on the ear and recite whatever poems I knew by heart and feed me awful processed snacks from the vending machine, since I wouldn’t have touched the fish. And then in the morning I’d have me back nice and early, so I could make team breakfast before the game.”
She didn’t love David anymore, but love had trained her to see the world through his eyes, and through his eyes this place was a vapid dump.
You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard.
“I’ll be at the game,” Affenlight said, eager to cement some tiny portion of their future.
“How many times does something happen before we give it a name? And until the name exists, neither does the condition.
“Doubt has always existed,” Aparicio said. “Even for athletes.”
All he’d ever wanted was for nothing to ever change. Or for things to change only in the right ways, improving little by little, day by day, forever.
There were two kinds of incompetent con men. Those who talked too much and those who didn’t talk enough.
That was the idiot hopefulness of humans, always to love what was unformed.
You could say that young people were desired because they had smooth bodies and excellent reproductive chances, but you’d mostly be missing the point. There was something much sadder in it than that. Something like constant regret, the sense that your whole life was an error, a mistake, that you were desperate to redo.
He wondered, not for the first time, what it would have been like to spend a few decades with a woman like that—a woman who turned family life into a smooth-running corporate entity, whose genius was to take a sizable income and make it seem infinite, who knew how to convert money into pleasure and pleasantry.
They’d been fighting half her life, and yet the fights always felt like aberrations.
People thought becoming an adult meant that all your acts had consequences; in fact it was just the opposite.
His would always be occluded by the fact that his understanding and his ambition outstripped his talent.
What would he say to her, if he was going to speak truly? He didn’t know. Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn’t plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone would catch them—you had to throw out words you knew no one would catch. You had to send your words out where they weren’t yours anymore.
If Affenlight were to list the things he loved, he wouldn’t include Westish—that would seem silly, like saying you loved yourself. He spent half his time frustrated with, ambivalent about, annoyed at the place. But anything that happened to alter the fortunes of Westish College, however small; anything that was done to or even said about Westish College, Affenlight took more seriously than if it were happening to himself.
There were no whys in a person’s life, and very few hows. In the end, in search of useful wisdom, you could only come back to the most hackneyed concepts, like kindness, forbearance, infinite patience.
Deep down, he thought, we all believe we’re God. We secretly believe that the outcome of the game depends on us, even when we’re only watching—on the way we breathe in, the way we breathe out, the T-shirt we wear, whether we close our eyes as the pitch leaves the pitcher’s hand and heads toward Schwartz.
Men were such odd creatures. They didn’t duel anymore, even fistfights had come to seem barbaric, the old casual violence all channeled through institutions now, but still they loved to uphold their ancient codes. And what they loved even more was to forgive each other.
“You told me once that a soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love....more
Favorite book series EVER. The way she captures Elena and Lila's friendship is incredible. I've heard that some people do not like this book, but forFavorite book series EVER. The way she captures Elena and Lila's friendship is incredible. I've heard that some people do not like this book, but for anyone who has ever had a true and complicated friendship, this book is impossible to put down. Also, the writing is lovely (good job to the translator!)
Highlights:
###
soon had to admit that what I did by myself couldn’t excite me, only what Lila touched became important.
Meanwhile I wanted that conversation to become the model for all our next encounters.
Also for the first time, I felt how, having to search for words on a subject where I didn’t have words ready, I tended to reduce the relationship between Lila and me to extreme declarations that were all exaggeratedly positive.
Yes, I thought, maybe she’s changing, and not only physically but in the way she expresses herself. It seemed to me—articulated in words of today—that not only did she know how to put things well but she was developing a gift that I was already familiar with: more effectively than she had as a child, she took the facts and in a natural way charged them with tension; she intensified reality as she reduced it to words, she injected it with energy.
because she knew how to be autonomous whereas I needed her,
I wanted her to be curious, to want at least a little to share my adventure from the outside, to feel she was losing something of me as I always feared losing much of her.
Would she always do the things I was supposed to do, before and better than me? She eluded me when
Sometimes I even had the impression that it was Lila who depended on me and not I on her.
words, the last ten days of July gave me a sense of well-being that I had never known before. I felt a sensation that later in my life was often repeated: the joy of the new.
However hard I tried in my letters to communicate the privilege of the days in Ischia, my river of words and her silence seemed to demonstrate that my life was splendid but uneventful, which left me time to write to her every day, while hers was dark but full.
Nino has something that’s eating him inside, like Lila, and it’s a gift and a suffering; they aren’t content, they never give in
Lila was able to speak through writing; unlike me when I wrote, unlike Sarratore in his articles and poems, unlike even many writers I had read and was reading, she expressed herself in sentences that were well constructed, and without error, even though she had stopped going to school, but—further—she left no trace of effort, you weren’t aware of the artifice of the written word.
Perhaps the idea of money as a cement to solidify our existence and prevent it from dissolving, together with the people who were dear to us, endured. But the fundamental feature that now prevailed was concreteness, the daily gesture, the negotiation.
Money gave even more force to the impression that what I lacked she had, and vice versa, in a continuous game of exchanges and reversals that, now happily, now painfully, made us indispensable to each other.
I knew—perhaps I hoped—that no form could ever contain Lila, and that sooner or later she would break everything again.
I was ashamed of myself, but I was no longer able to trace a coherent design in the division of our fates. The concreteness of that date made concrete the crossroads that would separate our lives.
It was during that journey to Via Orazio that I began to be made unhappy by my own alienness. I had grown up with those boys, I considered their behavior normal, their violent language was mine. But for six years now I had also been following daily a path that they were completely ignorant of and in the end I had confronted it brilliantly. With them I couldn’t use any of what I learned every day, I had to suppress myself, in some way diminish myself. What I was in school I was there obliged to put aside or use treacherously, to intimidate them. I asked myself what I was doing in that car....more
This is the funniest, and in some ways truest, book I've ever read. It's characters are insanely whacky, which makes it all the more relatable.
HighligThis is the funniest, and in some ways truest, book I've ever read. It's characters are insanely whacky, which makes it all the more relatable.
Highlights:
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I checked to see if he and I had a special connection that was greater than his bond with his mother. We didn’t.
That’s the problem with men my age, I’m somehow older than them.
When you live alone people are always thinking they can stay with you, when the opposite is true: who they should stay with is a person whose situation is already messed up by other people and so one more won’t matter.
I made myself very still so he would continue; I love to be described.
It doesn’t have a name—I just call it my system. Let’s say a person is down in the dumps, or maybe just lazy, and they stop doing the dishes. Soon the dishes are piled sky-high and it seems impossible to even clean a fork. So the person starts eating with dirty forks out of dirty dishes and this makes the person feel like a homeless person. So they stop bathing. Which makes it hard to leave the house. The person begins to throw trash anywhere and pee in cups because they’re closer to the bed. We’ve all been this person, so there is no place for judgment, but the solution is simple: Fewer dishes.
How much time do you spend moving objects to and fro? Before you move something far from where it lives, remember you’re eventually going to have to carry it back to its place—is it really worth it? Can’t you read the book standing right next to the shelf with your finger holding the spot you’ll put it back into? Or better yet: don’t read it. And if you are carrying an object, make sure to pick up anything that might need to go in the same direction. This is called carpooling. Putting new soap in the bathroom? Maybe wait until the towels in the dryer are done and carry the towels and soap together. Maybe put the soap on the dryer until then.
Like a rich person, I live with a full-time servant who keeps everything in order—and because the servant is me, there’s no invasion of privacy.
After days and days alone it gets silky to the point where I can’t even feel myself anymore, it’s as if I don’t exist.
Obviously her features were better than mine, but if you just looked at the spaces between the features, I won.
Some people think it’s really important to be in the moment with sex, to be present with the other person; for me it’s important to block out the person and replace them, entirely if possible, with my thing.
Reincarnation?” “I don’t relate to that word.”
He drove like he lived, with entitlement, not using the blinker, just gliding very quickly between lanes in his Land Rover. At first I kept looking over my shoulder to check if the lane was actually clear or if we were going to die, but after a while I threw caution to the wind and sank back into the heated leather seat. Fear was for poor people. Maybe this was the happiest I’d ever been.
Everything in the bathroom was white. I sat on the toilet and looked at my thighs nostalgically. Soon they would be perpetually entwined in his thighs, never alone, not even when they wanted to be. But it couldn’t be helped. We had a good run, me and me. I imagined shooting an old dog, an old faithful dog, because that’s what I was to myself. Go on, boy, get. I watched myself dutifully trot ahead. Then I lowered my rifle and what actually happened was I began to have a bowel movement. It was unplanned, but once begun it was best to finish. I flushed and washed my hands and only by luck did I happen to glance back at the toilet. It was still there. One had to suppose it was the dog, shot, but refusing to die. This could get out of hand, I could flush and flush and Phillip would wonder what was going on and I’d have to say The dog won’t die gracefully. Is the dog yourself, as you’ve known yourself until now? Yes. No need to kill it, my sweet girl, he’d say, reaching into the toilet bowl with a slotted spoon. We need a dog. But it’s old and has strange, unchangeable habits. So do I, my dear. So do we all. I flushed again and it went down. I could tell him about it later.
For plain water I was Heidi, dipping a metal ladle into a well. It’s from the end, when she’s living in the Alps. For orange juice I was Sarge from the Beetle Bailey comic, where Sarge and Beetle Bailey go to Florida and drink all-you-can-drink orange juice. Glug, glug, glug. It worked because it wasn’t me, it was the character swallowing, offhandedly—just a brief moment in a larger story.
The urgency predated cars—it had to be me alone thrusting through space, chest out, hair blown back. Each driver who saw me thought, She is running for her life, she will die if she doesn’t get there, and they were right. Except it was quite a bit farther on foot than I had anticipated, and the rain had thickened. My clothes became heavy with water, my face was washed again and again. Each driver who passed me thought, She is a giant rat or some other wet, craven animal whose hunger strips her of her dignity. And they were right.
“I appreciate the gift but I’m not . . . you know. I’m into dick.” She coughed huskily and spit into one of the empty Pepsi bottles on the coffee table. “We’re in the same boat, as far as that goes,” I said. I saw us in a little dinghy together, liking dick on the big dark sea.
pause—I saw us through the homeless gardener’s eyes and felt obscene. Being outside society, he didn’t know about adult games; he was like me before I met Ruth-Anne, thinking everything that happened in life was real.
The noise shook everything out of my head. What a magical way to get around. I’d always thought of these types of machines as toys for uneducated people who didn’t care about the environment, but maybe they weren’t. Maybe this was a kind of meditation. I felt connected to everything and the motor volume held me at a level of alertness I wasn’t used to. I kept waking up and then waking up from that, and then waking up even more. Was everything redneck actually mystical?
See, this is what we do, I began, we exist in time. That’s what living is; you’re doing it right now as much as anyone. I could tell he was deciding. He was feeling it out and had come to no conclusions yet. The warm, dark place he had come from versus this bright, beepy, dry world. Try not to base your decision on this room, it isn’t representative of the whole world. Somewhere the sun is hot on a rubbery leaf, clouds are making shapes and reshaping and reshaping, a spiderweb is broken but still works. And in case he wasn’t into nature, I added: And it’s a really wild time in terms of technology. You’ll probably have a robot and that will be normal.
Should I introduce myself or try to kill them? Not violently, just enough that they wouldn’t exist.
Anyone who questions what satisfaction can be gained from a not-so-bright girlfriend half one’s age has never had one. It just feels good all over. It’s like wearing something beautiful and eating something delicious at the same time, all the time.
Sometimes I looked at her sleeping face, the living flesh of it, and was overwhelmed by how precarious it was to love a living thing. She could die simply from lack of water. It hardly seemed safer than falling in love with a plant.
But as the sun rose I crested the mountain of my self-pity and remembered I was always going to die at the end of this life anyway. What did it really matter if I spent it like this—caring for this boy—as opposed to some other way? I would always be earthbound; he hadn’t robbed me of my ability to fly or to live forever. I appreciated nuns now, not the conscripted kind, but modern women who chose it. If you were wise enough to know that this life would consist mostly of letting go of things you wanted, then why not get good at the letting go, rather than the trying to have?
There would be other unpardonable crimes, I could feel them coming—things that in retrospect would become my greatest regrets. I’d always be catching up with my love. How terrible....more
I read this book after a friend cited it as her all-time favorite book, that she reads it at least once a year. Whenever someone says that, I take notI read this book after a friend cited it as her all-time favorite book, that she reads it at least once a year. Whenever someone says that, I take note. So I bought it on Amazon and got right to reading. I started out very interested, but quickly began to feel that there was no plot. Certainly there is not a lot of action in the book. Part 1 is basically just a dinner conversation and part 2 is basically just a guy getting ready to get to work. So, to me, it was not a page turner nor did it qualify as my own personal favorite book. But as I went back to look at my highlights, I remembered that the writing was truly wonderful. The religious discussion is interesting and deep and the phrases are original. I would recommend it, although perhaps not as a yearly read.
Favorite bits:
"…he resented and feared any signs of detachment in a girl he was seriously dating." -p.16
"She found herself looking at Lane as if he were a stranger, or a poster advertising a brand of linoleum, across the aisle of a subway car. Again she felt the trickle of disloyalty and guilt, which seemed to be the order of the day, and reacted to it by reaching over to core Lane's hand with her own." -p.16
"Lane was busy affecting a brand of detachment of his own." -p.17
"Lane couldn't let controversy drop until it had been resolved in his favor." -p.18
"I say it's a compound, or multiple, love story, pure and complicated." -p.49
"We are, all four of us, blood relatives, and we speak a kind of esoteric, family language, a sort of semantic geometry in which the shortest distance between any two points is a fullish circle." -p.49
"Surely the only woman in the world who can write a letter in invisible italics." -p.56
"For all the years I've been moving my literary whore's cubicle from village to college, I still don't have even a B.A." -p.58
"You've even both been up here on man a weekend in the last couple of years, and though we've talked and talked and talked, we've all agreed not to say a word." -p.67
"…all legitimate religious study must lead to unlearning the differences, the illusory differences, between boys and girls, animals and stones, day and night, heat and cold." -p.67-68
"Her entrances into rooms were usually verbal as well as physical." -p.72
"…college was just one more dopey, inane place in the world dedicated to piling up treasure on earth and everything. I mean treasure is treasure, for heaven's sake. What's the difference whether the treasure is money, or property, or even culture, or even just plain knowledge? It all seemed like exactly the same thing to me, if you take off the wrapping - and it still does!" -p.146
"I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while - just once in a while- there was at least some polite little perfunctory implicated tat knowledge should lead to wisdom." -p.146 ...more
I agree with others that this book could have been shorter. But I also agree with others that this was a wonderful book. The perfect mix of suspensefuI agree with others that this book could have been shorter. But I also agree with others that this was a wonderful book. The perfect mix of suspenseful plot and beautiful writing. Murakami has done it again.
This book is about 800 pages (I think) and I read it in just over a week. That says something.
Favorite bits:
Reality was utterly coolheaded and utterly lonely.
Hmm. Real life is different from math. Things in life don’t necessarily flow over the shortest possible route. For me, math is—how should I put it?—math is all too natural. It’s like beautiful scenery. It’s just there. There’s no need to exchange it with anything else. That’s why, when I’m doing math, I sometimes feel I’m turning transparent. And that can be scary.
Tengo could not quite relax when he was with energetic young college girls. It was like playing with a kitten, fresh and fun at first, but tiring in the end.
It was her personal view that people who are overly choosy about the drinks they order in a bar tend to be sexually bland. She had no idea why this should be so.
He was a born technician, possessing both the intense concentration of a bird sailing through the air in search of prey and the patience of a donkey hauling water, playing always by the rules of the game.
My specialty is cultural anthropology,” the Professor said. “I gave up being a scholar some time ago, but I’m still permeated with the spirit of the discipline. One aim of my field is to relativize the images possessed by individuals, discover in these images the factors universal to all human beings, and feed these universal truths back to those same individuals. As a result of this process, people might be able to belong to something even as they maintain their autonomy.
Where relations with the opposite sex were concerned, Tamaki was truly a born victim.
what good was mathematics? Wasn’t it just a temporary means of escape that made his real-life situation even worse? As his doubts increased, Tengo began deliberately to put some distance between himself and the world of mathematics, and instead the forest of story began to exert a stronger pull on his heart. Of course, reading novels was just another form of escape. As soon as he closed their pages he had to come back to the real world. But at some point Tengo noticed that returning to reality from the world of a novel was not as devastating a blow as returning from the world of mathematics.
What did it mean for a person to be free? she would often ask herself. Even if you managed to escape from one cage, weren’t you just in another, larger one?
If, as the dowager had said, we are nothing but gene carriers, why do so many of us have to lead such strangely shaped lives? Wouldn’t our genetic purpose—to transmit DNA—be served just as well if we lived simple lives, not bothering our heads with a lot of extraneous thoughts, devoted entirely to preserving life and procreating?
That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.
Time and freedom: those are the most important things that people can buy with money.
Guns are like cars: you can trust a good used one better than one that’s brand-new.
The world moves less by money than by what you owe people and what they owe you. I don’t like to owe anybody anything, so I keep myself as much on the lending side as I can.
For a ten-year-old boy and girl to become good friends was not easy under any circumstances. Indeed, it might be one of the most difficult accomplishments in the world.
Once you pass a certain age, life becomes nothing more than a process of continual loss. Things that are important to your life begin to slip out of your grasp, one after another, like a comb losing teeth. And the only things that come to take their place are worthless imitations. Your physical strength, your hopes, your dreams, your ideals, your convictions, all meaning, or, then again, the people you love: one by one, they fade away. Some announce their departure before they leave, while others just disappear all of a sudden without warning one day. And once you lose them you can never get them back.
possessing an outstanding talent that is not sufficient may be more dangerous than possessing nothing at all.
Apathy enveloped him as if it were his own personal haze.
“If you can’t understand it without an explanation, you can’t understand it with an explanation.”
“In this world, there is no absolute good, no absolute evil,” the man said. “Good and evil are not fixed, stable entities but are continually trading places. A good may be transformed into an evil in the next second. And vice versa. Such was the way of the world that Dostoevsky depicted in The Brothers Karamazov. The most important thing is to maintain the balance between the constantly moving good and evil. If you lean too much in either direction, it becomes difficult to maintain actual morals. Indeed, balance itself is the good.
The scene outside the window suggested that the world had settled in a place somewhere midway between “being miserable” and “lacking in joy,”
She has only the vague impression that “rev-a-loo-shun” is a kind of pointed way of thinking, while “peese” has a rather more rounded shape.
Nobody’s easier to fool, Ushikawa thought, than the person who is convinced that he is right.
“Abundant talent is like a rich vein of water underground that finds all sorts of places to gush forth.
“There is always just a thin line separating deep faith from intolerance,” Ushikawa said. “And it’s very hard for people to do anything about it.”
Being alive, if you had to define it, meant emitting a variety of smells.
“I don’t mind teaching,” the friend said. “I even enjoy it at times. But I found that the longer you teach, the more you feel like a total stranger to yourself.”
To him, their minds were dull, their vision narrow and devoid of imagination, and all they cared about was what other people thought. More than anything, they were completely lacking in the sort of healthy skepticism needed to attain any degree of wisdom.
The winds of reality had not extinguished the flame in his heart. There was nothing more significant.
“We needed that much time,” Tengo said, “to understand how lonely we really were.”...more
I really look up to Gloria Steinem and I loved learning more about her important contributions to feminism by reading this book (her memoir). I foundI really look up to Gloria Steinem and I loved learning more about her important contributions to feminism by reading this book (her memoir). I found the Hillary Clinton chapter of this book to be a bit off-putting. I understand why she did it, but it felt like a political campaign ad right smack dab in the middle of the book. I am a Clinton supporter, but would have preferred to see that part of the book taken up with more of Gloria's fascinating stories.
Highlights:
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Sometimes I think the only real division into two is between people who divide everything into two, and those who don’t.
“Hate generalizes, love specifies.”
Faraway India helped to introduce me to the way most people live in the world, something way beyond anything I knew. I’m still thankful to that huge and struggling country for being impossible to ignore; otherwise I might have come home as the same person I was when I left.
hope is a form of planning.
My dream bore a suspicious resemblance to the life I saw in movies, but my longing for it was like a constant low-level fever.
If I pressed hard enough, she would add, “If I’d left, you never would have been born.” I never had the courage to say: But you would have been born instead.
Like many daughters especially, I was living out the unlived life of my mother.
I never told my father how grateful I was that he was different from my best friend’s father. I had just witnessed my first humiliating clean-your-plate-or-you-can’t-have-dessert incident at her house. When I came home, I tested my father. We were eating in our usual haphazard way in the living room—never on the debris-covered dining room table that was used only on national holidays—and he asked me if I wanted dessert. I pointed out that I hadn’t finished my dinner. “That’s okay,” he said as he went into the kitchen for ice cream. “Sometimes you’re hungry for one thing and not another.” I loved him so much at that moment.
Only after I saw women who were attracted to distant, condescending, even violent men did I begin to understand that having a distant, condescending, even violent father could make those qualities seem inevitable, even feel like home. Because of my father, only kindness felt like home.
I had wanted to escape my traveling childhood, yet I was traveling and making the discovery that ordinary people are smart, smart people are ordinary, decisions are best made by the people affected by them, and human beings have an almost infinite capacity for adapting to the expectations around us—which is both the good and the bad news.
I began to see that for some, religion was just a form of politics you couldn’t criticize.
“When an Ethiopian general is killed, the troops are in disarray,” one Eritrean driver explained to me. “When an Eritrean general is killed, every fighter becomes a general.”
If you travel long enough, every story becomes a novel.
If you do anything people care about, people will take care of you.
No wonder studies show that women’s intellectual self-esteem tends to go down as years of education go up. We have been studying our own absence.
They applaud when Margaret says, “I still have scars on my head and dust between my toes from marching across that bridge in Selma. Once I was left for dead. But when the organizing began, they asked me to make coffee.”
Since many have also been raised with traditional southern ideas of womanhood, they also cheer when I talk about women feeling like a half-person without a man standing next to them, whether on Saturday night or throughout life. This would surprise men, too, I explain, if they realized how little it matters which man is standing there. More laughter, and cries of “Tell it!”
If there is one that men want to talk about most, it’s how much they missed having nurturing fathers, or any man in their lives who cared. Once they delve into that, the question is how to become that father or man themselves. This childhood wish is one of the greatest allies that feminism could have.
I could see that not speaking up made my mother feel worse. This was my first hint of the truism that depression is anger turned inward; thus women are twice as likely to be depressed.
I’ve noticed that great political leaders are energized by conflict. I’m energized by listening to people’s stories and trying to figure out shared solutions. That’s the work of an organizer.
Both white and black women were more likely than their male counterparts to support Hillary Clinton—and in my observation, also more likely to believe that she couldn’t win. Male and female black voters were more likely than white voters to support Obama and also to believe he couldn’t win. Each group was made pessimistic by the depth of the bias they had experienced.
Women are always better liked if we sacrifice ourselves for something bigger—and something bigger always means including men, even though something bigger for men doesn’t usually mean including women. In choosing Hillary, I would be seen as selfish for supporting a woman “like” me. But that was a warning, too. Needing approval is a female cultural disease, and often a sign of doing the wrong thing.
children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman;
A writer’s greatest reward is naming something unnamed that many people are feeling. A writer’s greatest punishment is being misunderstood. The same words can do both.
the power to make people laugh is also a power, so women have been kept out of comedy.
Polls show that what women fear most from men is violence, and what men fear most from women is ridicule.
We can be made to fear. We can even be made to believe we’re in love because, if we’re kept dependent and isolated for long enough, we bond in order to survive. But laughter explodes like an aha! It comes when the punch line changes everything that has gone before, when two opposites collide and make a third, when we suddenly see a new reality. Einstein said he had to be very careful while shaving, because when he had an idea, he laughed—and he cut himself. Laughter is an orgasm of the mind.
Since learning causes our brains to grow new synapses, I like to believe that the road is sharpening my mind and lengthening my life with surprise.
Truckers are such constant listeners that they dictate pop music hits. Also, Nashville produces specialty truckers’ songs as a profitable category. Who knew?
“You’re always the person you were when you were born,” she says impatiently. “You just keep finding new ways to express it.”
Those with extra money discover how much more satisfying it is to see talent and fairness grow than to see objects accumulate. Those without money learn the valuable lesson that money doesn’t cure all woes. Instead, it may actually insulate and isolate. I think this
No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren’t.
“The root of oppression is the loss of memory.”
By respecting and expecting self-authority in others, she drew people out of passivity and despair.
YOU CANNOT THINK YOURSELF INTO RIGHT LIVING. YOU LIVE YOURSELF INTO RIGHT THINKING. —Native Elders...more
I've seen many people recommend this book and so when I saw it at a book fair, it was an automatic purchase. I absolutely loved the introduction by RoI've seen many people recommend this book and so when I saw it at a book fair, it was an automatic purchase. I absolutely loved the introduction by Robert McKee. It really spoke to me. And I felt the same way as I began writing the book. This wasn't a cheesy business book telling you 100 like hacks, it was a book that acknowledged what we all do (get in our own way) and provided helpful observations on the difference between those who succeed and those who do not. I usually find non-fiction rather dry and hard to get through, but I found myself grabbing any time I could to read this book. The format of short chapters also enhanced my enjoyment and desire to read for even little intervals, since most sections are only a page or two.
The hard part for me when reading this book is that I do not see myself as an artist. I do write software for a living, which is certainly a craft and many would argue an art. Is that my art? Or is Steven Pressfield trying to get at something different? I'm still not sure. But I still value his insights and think many of them do apply to what I do for a living, even if it isn't a traditional art.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the first two seconds of the book, the third section I found less enjoyable. It went into the idea of inspiration and muses and seemed much to religious / vague to me. Which is perhaps why I loved the introduction, which makes that very point. But overall, I found a lot of value in this book and would recommend it to any ambitious person who has experienced the difficult of achieving success.
Favorite bits: "Rule of thumb: The more important a call or action is to our soul's evolution, the more Resistance we will feel toward pursuing it." -p.12 "The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extend of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them." -p.37 "The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death." -p.39 "I'm keenly aware of the Principle of Priority, which states (a) you must know the difference between what is urgent and what is important, and (b) you must do what's important first." -p.65 "My friend Tony Keppelman snapped me out of it by asking if I was gonna quit. Hell, no! 'Then be happy. You're where you wanted to be, aren't you? So you're taking a few blows. That's the price for being in the arena and not on the sidelines. Stop complaining and be grateful.'" -p.72 "We cannot let external criticism, even if it's true, fortify our internal foe. That foe is strong enough already." -p.88 "Tomorrow morning the critics will be gone, but the writer will still be there facing the blank page. Nothing matters but that he keep working." -p.92 "The critic hates most that which he would have done himself if he had had the guts." -p.93 "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now." -p.122 (W.H Murray, The Scottish Himalayan Expedition) "This process of self-revision and self-correction is so common we don't even notice. But it's a miracle. And its implications are staggering." -p.125 "In the hierarchy, the artists looks up and looks down. The one places he can't look is that place he must: within." -p.151 ...more
This wasn't one of those books where I related to the characters, but I did think they had some pretty interesting ideas. I also really appreciated thThis wasn't one of those books where I related to the characters, but I did think they had some pretty interesting ideas. I also really appreciated the obsession with Japan. And oh yeah, I bawled my eyes out at the end. So that must mean I connected with the book at a certain level. I think overall this book plays well to the isolation we all feel at times, the feeling that nobody understands us. And is a good reminder that those feelings can be overcome, even for the most isolated among us.
Favorite bits:
"Politics," she says. "A toy for little rich kids that they won't let anyone else play with" -pg.33
"We are mistaken to believe our consciousness is awakened at the moment of our first birth–perhaps because we do not know how to imagine any other living state." -pg.44
"The only purpose of cats is that they constitute mobile decorative objects, a concept which I find intellectually interesting, but unfortunately our cats have such drooping bellies that this does not apply to them." -pg.51
"My mother makes the cats into what she wishes we were, and which we are absolutely not." -pg.52
"In short, in my opinion the cat is a modern totem. Say what you want, do what you will with all those fine speeches on evolution, civilization and a ton of other 'tion' words, mankind has not progressed very far from its origins: people still believe they're not here by chance, and that there are gods, kindly for the most part, who are watching over them." -pg.52
"If you have voluntarily saddled yourself with a dog that you'll have to walk twice a day, come rain wind or snow, that is as good as having put a leash around your own neck." -pg.67
"For years my inevitable conclusion has been that the films of the seventh art are beautiful, powerful and soporific, and that blockbuster movies are pointless, very moving, and immensely satisfying." -pg.72
"If there is one thing I detest, it's when people transform their powerlessness or alienation into a creed." -pg.85
"In our world, that's the way you live your grown-up life: you must constantly rebuild your identity as an adult, the way it's been put together is wobbly, ephemeral, and fragile, it cloaks despair and, when you're alone in fron of the mirror, it tells you the lies you need to believe." -pg.92
"True novelty is that which does not grow old, despite the passage of time." -pg.100
"Players who are too greedy will ose: it is a subtle game of equilibrium, where you have to get ahead without crushing the other player. In the end, life and death are only the consequences of how well or how poorly you have made your construction." -pg.114
"We live each day as if it were merely a rehearsal for the next." -pg.119
(re: Levin in the field, enjoying forgetfulness) "This is eminently true of many happy moments in life. Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence." -pg.123
"But if you dread tomorrow, it's because you don't know how to build the present, and when you don't know how to build the present, you tell yourself you can deal with it tomorrow, and it's a lost cause anyway because tomorrow always ends up becoming today, don't you see?" -pg.128
(random meta moment in the book) "You will note at this juncture in our little mystery that the current vignette is barren of dialogue, an element that one ordinarily notices by virtue of a succession of quotation marks running vertically down the page as the speaks each take their turn." -pg.137
"We don't recognize each other because other people have become our permanent mirrors. If we actually realized this, if we were able to become aware of the fact that we are only ever looking at ourselves in the other person, that we are alone in the wilderness, we would go crazy." -pg.145
"Perhaps the Japanese have learned that you can only savor a pleasure when you know it is ephemeral and unique." -pg.163
"Intelligence, in itself, is neither valuable nor interesting." -pg.166
"And when intelligence takes itself for its own goal, it operates very strangely: the proof that it exists is not to be found in the ingenuity or simplicity of what it produces, but in how obscurely it is expressed." -pg.167
"There's so much humanity in a love of trees, so much nostalgia for our first sense of wonder, so much power in just feeling our own insignificance when we are surrounded by nature." -pg.169
"I have no children, I do not watch television, and I do not believe in God–all paths taken by mortals to make their lives easier." -pg.177
"Children help us to defer the painful task of confronting ourselves, and grandchildren take over from them." -pg.177
"Television distracts us from the onerous necessity of finding projects to construct in the vacuity of our frivolous lives: by beguiling our eyes, television releases our mind from the great work of making meaning." -pg.177
"Finally, God appeases our animal fears and the unbearable prospect that someday all our pleasures will cease." -pg.177
(referring to psychologist) "trade in human suffering" -pg.209
"And here I am now and my tiny bladder has just reminded me of its existence. Painfully aware that I have imbibed liters of tea that very afternoon, I cannot ignore its message: reduced autonomy." -pg.213
"Just as teardrops, when they are large and round and compassionate, can leave a long strand washed clean if discord, the summer rain as it washes away the motionless dust can bring to a person's soul something like endless breathing. That is the way a summe rain can take hold in you–like a new heart, beating in time with another's." -pg.233
"The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in a field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function the self-reproduction of a sterile elite–for this turns the university into a sect." -pg.252
"The peace of mind one experiences on one's own, one's certainty of self in the serenity of solitude, are nothing in comparison to the release and openness and fluency one shares with another, in close companionship." -pg.277 ...more
I feel conflicted about this book. On the one hand, I don't believe in fate/destiny/god, which is a strong theme in the book. In fact, it's kind of thI feel conflicted about this book. On the one hand, I don't believe in fate/destiny/god, which is a strong theme in the book. In fact, it's kind of the only theme of the book. That every person is *meant* to do something and being afraid to not do that is why so many people are unhappy or unsatisfied in life - THAT is the theme of this book.
But, without giving too much away, I want to say that the end really brought me back to liking this book. Despite the message given in the first 99% of the book, I think the message, in the end, is that we go through life and have experiences so that we may return to the beginning and realize that was where we were supposed to be the whole time.
There are some good life lessons in here, but it is, in the end, a parable.
Oscar Wilde said: “Each man kills the thing he loves.” And it’s true. The mere possibility of getting what we want fills the soul of the ordinary person with guilt.
The boy could see in his father’s gaze a desire to be able, himself, to travel the world—a desire that was still alive, despite his father’s having had to bury it, over dozens of years, under the burden of struggling for water to drink, food to eat, and the same place to sleep every night of his life.Read more at location
It’s the possibility of having a dream come true that makes life interesting,Read more at location
When someone sees the same people every day, as had happened with him at the seminary, they wind up becoming a part of that person’s life. And then they want the person to change. If someone isn’t what others want them to be, the others become angry. Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own.
“It’s a book that says the same thing almost all the other books in the world say,” continued the old man. “It describes people’s inability to choose their own Personal Legends. And it ends up saying that everyone believes the world’s greatest lie.” “What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked, completely surprised. “It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.”
when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it.
“‘Well, there is only one piece of advice I can give you,’ said the wisest of wise men. ‘The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon.’”
When someone makes a decision, he is really diving into a strong current that will carry him to places he had never dreamed of when he first made the decision.
“You should pay more attention to the caravan,” the boy said to the Englishman, after the camel driver had left. “We make a lot of detours, but we’re always heading for the same destination.” “And you ought to read more about the world,” answered the Englishman. “Books are like caravans in that respect.”
He tried to deal with the concept of love as distinct from possession, and couldn’t separate them.
“If good things are coming, they will be a pleasant surprise,” said the seer. “If bad things are, and you know in advance, you will suffer greatly before they even occur.”
“It’s not what enters men’s mouths that’s evil,” said the alchemist. “It’s what comes out of their mouths that is.”
It’s not often that money saves a person’s life.
when we love, we always strive to become better than we are.
I’m an old, superstitious Arab, and I believe in our proverbs. There’s one that says, ‘Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.’”...more
I liked Po Bronson's "What should I do with my life?", and when I heard that this book was a similar style, I knew I would enjoy it.
This is one of thoI liked Po Bronson's "What should I do with my life?", and when I heard that this book was a similar style, I knew I would enjoy it.
This is one of those books that you not only read, but are constantly quoting and paraphrasing to friends while you are reading it and long after, as well. The stories are somewhat memorable but even more memorable is the feeling it leaves you with: families are hard. you are normal. just keep going.
Favorite bits:
“The last book I wrote was about our individual journeys. It began with this line: ‘We are all writing the story of our life.’ As we respond to the challenges and exert some choice over what interests we pursue, we are composing our own life story.
But when it comes to family, it’s a little different. I like to say, ‘We are all constantly rewriting the story of our family.’
When we are born, we are handed this backstory, and then we spend our first decade with little control over how our journey unfolds. In our second decade, our understanding of the story begins to develop. We make conscious connections, notice patterns, and maybe inject some drama into the story, too. In our third decade, we gain some control over where this story will go. We decide how much separation we need from the past in order to hear our own feelings. We ask very threatening questions, such as ‘Do I need a family? What is their purpose?’ And we begin to push to create a family of our own.
Creating families of our own involves both building with new people and changing the relationships we have to those we’ve grown up with. On both fronts, we try to shape the stroy, adding new chapters as a way of changing how the old story lines turn out.”
- p.9
"Family tests us - it tests our ability to see the new in the old, the beauty in the ordinary" - p.9
“We get a lot of things from our families, but one of the most innately wired things we get is a template for how to give and receive love. Even if we have cut off all ties to our families, we carry this template forward in life.
Everyone has different feelings about this template. Some people feel they were taught very well how to love. Others feel they were taught terribly and given nothing but bad habits they’ve had to break. But most people who put themselves in the middle. They were taught some of the pieces, but others are missing.
It is the fashion of the day to complain about these missing pieces - to blame our backstory for not having full prepared us. But I think that’s a mistake. I think we are all meant to search. We have all been taught some of what love is, and the rest we have to go figure out. There is a yearning to fill our gaps, to make up for what we have missed.
This is true for us, and it was true for our parents, and it was true for every generation before them. Unfortunately, it will also be true for our children. This is the nature of life. We have not been cheated. We get this chance at life, but we have to hold up our end of the bargain. We have to learn what love is, learn the parts we missed, and pass it on. That’s the deal”
- p.11
"When we build a mental image of ourselves - we see only these layers upon layers. We conclude, I am not a good person, or I have been hurt very badly. But we are mistaken. This is not our true nature. Inside us all, under all those layers, despite years and years of neglect, there is still a virtuous and noble person, waiting to be let out. We don't become good people. We simple cease, slowly, to be deluded by the layers" -p.34
"It reminded me that the start of a better life was not out there somewhere, out there in the freak-show universe of spiritual guides, but rather, that the start of a better life was my own goodness, and it was already inside me. It had been there all along, under all those layers. Waiting for me. I just had to calm down, stop looking everywhere else for answers, and start letting it out." - p.34
"When the Petrified Forest imagines parenthood, their hears are flooded with the feeling of doors closing, not opening." -p.39
"The size of a family does not correlate with whether or not it respects autonomy. Not to do so is a damaging trait. It destroys more families than it preserves." -p.84
"And while I would never say the past is an excuse, I do think it helps to have done your research. Give people credit for what they've had to cope with." -p.114
"When I visiting in April - exactly one year after Anne's trip to Belize - neither Anne nor Jerome could commit to making it work. However, the stalemate had budged, and here's how: Both had privately come to the realization that even if they married somebody else, they would be in the same situation.
Jerome realized his tendency to withdraw would destroy any relationship he was in. Anne realized her insistence that life be endlessly stimulating would always cause her to act out selfishly." -p.212
"It's said that there are four basic fears inherent to the nature of existence - you can have some of these fears no matter how well you might have been raised. They are the Fear of Dying, the Fear of Having to Choose, the Fear of Ending up Alone, and the Feat that the World Is Intrinsically Meaningless." -p.214
"In Japan, there was a deep tradition of honoring one's family specifically by maintaining the ancestral home. Their language makes a distinction between 'temporary family,' which includes only those around today, and the 'real family,' which includes the ancestors - meaning that just because you're alive doesn't mean you're more important." -p.224
I only read a few chapters of this book because it was Kindle loaned to be and those only last 2 weeks. But, I thought the part of this book that I diI only read a few chapters of this book because it was Kindle loaned to be and those only last 2 weeks. But, I thought the part of this book that I did read was very thought provoking. Pretty dry, but a good overview of the philosophy of justice. He gives strong arguments on both sides of every debate, which I appreciate.
Highlights:
Proponents of price-gouging laws argue that any estimate of the general welfare must include the pain and suffering of those who may be priced out of basic necessities during an emergency.
Does a just society seek to promote the virtue of its citizens? Or should law be neutral toward competing conceptions of virtue, so that citizens can be free to choose for themselves the best way to live?
According to the textbook account, this question divides ancient and modern political thought. In one important respect, the textbook is right. Aristotle teaches that justice means giving people what they deserve.
Americans are harder on failure than on greed.
In market-driven societies, ambitious people are expected to pursue their interests vigorously, and the line between self-interest and greed often blurs. But the line between success and failure is etched more sharply. And the idea that people deserve the rewards that success bestows is central to the American dream.
If big, systemic economic forces account for the disastrous loses of 2008 and 2009, couldn’t it be argued that they also account for the dazzling gains of earlier years?
moral reflection is not a solitary pursuit but a public endeavor. It requires an interlocutor—a friend, a neighbor, a comrade, a fellow citizen. Sometimes the interlocutor can be imagined rather than real, as when we argue with ourselves. But we cannot discover the meaning of justice or the best way to live through introspection alone.
All moral quarrels, properly understood, are disagreements about how to apply the utilitarian principle of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, not about the principle itself.
. . . He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation. He who chooses his plan for himself, employs all his faculties.
Of the two great proponents of utilitarianism, Mill was the more humane philosopher, Bentham the more consistent one.
Here, then, is the link between freedom as autonomy and Kant’s idea of morality. To act freely is not to choose the best means to a given end; it is to choose the end itself, for its own sake—a choice that human beings can make and billiard balls (and most animals) cannot.
“A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes,” Kant writes. It is good in itself, whether or not it prevails. “Even if . . . this will is entirely lacking in power to carry out its intentions; if by its utmost effort it still accomplishes nothing . . . even then it would still shine like a jewel for its own sake as something which has its full value in itself.”4 For any action to be morally good, “it is not enough that it should conform to the moral law—it must also be done for the sake of the moral law.” ...more
I read this with my book club. I think it's interesting that this is based on the life of Margaret Mead. I found the love story to be annoying / prediI read this with my book club. I think it's interesting that this is based on the life of Margaret Mead. I found the love story to be annoying / predictable. Overall, didn't love it, but def want to learn more about Margaret Mead!
Highlights:
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But it was impossible not to be envious of other people’s people. Until you laid it all out neatly on the page, your own tribe looked a mess.
‘Everyone becomes a genius when they die young.
But I’ve always thought my opinion was the right one. It’s a small flaw I have.’
I feel like I got most of life’s lessons before I turned six. For me, other people are the point, but other people can disappear. I guess I don’t have to tell you that.’
I’m not sure I’ve seen such height & sensitivity paired before. Very tall men are so often naturally removed and distant
Perhaps all science is merely self-investigation.
And all the while I am aware of a larger despair, as if Helen & I are vessels for the despair of all women and many men too. Who are we and where are we going? Why are we, with all our “progress,” so limited in understanding & sympathy & the ability to give each other real freedom? Why with our emphasis on the individual are we still so blinded by the urge to conform?
Always in her mind there had been the belief that somewhere on earth there was a better way to live, and that she would find it.
They know their ancestors have a plan for them. There’s no sense that it was wrong. Tragedy is based on this sense that there’s been a terrible mistake, isn’t it?’
Alone was not something you saw among tribes she’d studied. From an early age children were warned against it. Alone was how your soul got stolen by spirits, or your body kidnapped by enemies. Alone was when your thinking turned to evil.
When only one person is the expert on a particular people, do we learn more about the people or the anthropologist when we read the analysis?
Why are there so many tribes who share everything—food, shelter, land, income—but their stories always revolve around someone’s brother or best friend stealing his woman?’...more
I think this is a fascinating topic, but I abandoned this book. Too dry for me, unfortunately. Maybe I will attempt it again.
Highlights from what I reI think this is a fascinating topic, but I abandoned this book. Too dry for me, unfortunately. Maybe I will attempt it again.
Highlights from what I read:
#####
But by then, my optimism of 1984 had been challenged. I was meeting people, many people, who found online life more satisfying than what some derisively called “RL,” that is, real life.
Doug, a Midwestern college student, played four avatars, distributed across three different online worlds. He always had these worlds open as windows on his computer screen along with his schoolwork, e-mail program, and favorite games. He cycled easily through them. He told me that RL “is just one more window.” And, he added, “it’s not usually my best one.”
I thank Rebecca for her forbearance, for her insightful and decisive editorial support, and for giving me permission to quote her. She refused to friend me on Facebook, but she taught me how to text. The story of digital culture has been the story of Rebecca’s life. The book is written as a letter to her about how her mother sees the conversations in her future. Now Rebecca is nineteen,
if we are always on, we may deny ourselves the rewards of solitude.
Ellen’s multitasking removed her to another place. She felt her grandmother was talking to someone who was not really there. During their Skype conversations, Ellen and her grandmother were more connected than they had ever been before, but at the same time, each was alone. Ellen felt guilty and confused: she knew that her grandmother was happy, even if their intimacy was now, for Ellen, another task among multitasks....more
I am giving this book 4 stars because I remembering reading it quickly and enjoying it, but not 5 stars because I honestly can hardly remember readingI am giving this book 4 stars because I remembering reading it quickly and enjoying it, but not 5 stars because I honestly can hardly remember reading it at this point, which means it didn't leave much of an impression, in the end.
Highlights:
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It occurs to me that Grandma and Ralph have nothing, they don’t even enjoy Bonanza all that much, they just turned it on because my mom told them to let me watch it. There can’t be anything for them to enjoy, with their long empty days, full of curled-up old ladies and dirty sheep. They don’t even drink pop. ] On the other side of the dance floor Mitch stands listening intently to one of our distant, female relatives. He winks at us when she isn’t looking and we wink back hugely. “That’s my first husband, Mitch,” Wendell says fondly.
A woman friend stops over to visit me one afternoon. She is lonely, melancholy, and at loose ends. Do you ever feel like this? she asks me. That’s how the entire world feels, I say.
“He’s already left me,” I say, “he’s just too chicken to take his body with him.” “I know you don’t want to hear
I observe that he isn’t fully present past eight o’clock each night, and surprise myself by feeling grateful. I am left free to traipse around in my own psychic landscape. ...more
I read this after reading the Year of Magical Thinking. It's just as sad but didn't stick with me in the same way. Death is a topic we don't discuss mI read this after reading the Year of Magical Thinking. It's just as sad but didn't stick with me in the same way. Death is a topic we don't discuss much in our society. So, I recommend this book as a meditation on death and how to deal with the death of a loved one.
My highlights:
When we talk about mortality we are talking about our children.
Time passes. Could it be that I never believed it? Did I believe the blue nights could last forever?
In fact I no longer value this kind of memento. I no longer want reminders of what was, what got broken, what got lost, what got wasted. There was a period, a long period, dating from my childhood until quite recently, when I thought I did. A period during which I believed that I could keep people fully present, keep them with me, by preserving their mementos, their “things,” their totems.
In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here.
When we think about adopting a child, or for that matter about having a child at all, we stress the “blessing” aspect. We omit the instant of the sudden chill, the “what-if,” the free fall into certain failure.
“You have your wonderful memories,” people said later, as if memories were solace. Memories are not. Memories are by definition of times past, things gone.
I do not know many people who think they have succeeded as parents. Those who do tend to cite the markers that indicate (their own) status in the world: the Stanford degree, the Harvard MBA, the summer with the white-shoe law firm. Those of us less inclined to compliment ourselves on our parenting skills, in other words most of us, recite rosaries of our failures, our neglects, our derelictions and delinquencies. The very definition of success as a parent has undergone a telling transformation: we used to define success as the ability to encourage the child to grow into independent (which is to say into adult) life, to “raise” the child, to let the child go.
There comes a point, I told myself, at which a family is, for better or for worse, finished.
Aging and its evidence remain life’s most predictable events, yet they also remain matters we prefer to leave unmentioned, unexplored:
He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong. The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood; For nothing now can ever come to any good.
This entirely meaningless discovery floods me with restored hope, a revived sense of the possible....more
I've tried to read this book twice, most recently in Feb 2013. The writing and ideas are excellent, but this book did not have an addictive quality foI've tried to read this book twice, most recently in Feb 2013. The writing and ideas are excellent, but this book did not have an addictive quality for me so I never finished it. After re-reading my highlights, though, I am inspired to give in another try.
My highlights:
You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly
We want to make good time, but for us now this is measured with emphasis on “good” rather than “time” and when you make that shift in emphasis the whole approach changes.
Unless you’re fond of hollering you don’t make great conversations on a running cycle. Instead you spend your time being aware of things and meditating on them.
“Oh, the laws of physics and of logic…the number system…the principle of algebraic substitution. These are ghosts. We just believe in them so thoroughly they seem real.”
“We believe the disembodied words of Sir Isaac Newton were sitting in the middle of nowhere billions of years before he was born and that magically he discovered these words. They were always there, even when they applied to nothing. Gradually the world came into being and then they applied to it. In fact, those words themselves were what formed the world. That, John, is ridiculous.
I started to roll over for more sleep but heard a rooster crowing and then became aware we are on vacation and there is no point in sleeping.
Each machine has its own, unique personality which probably could be defined as the intuitive sum total of everything you know and feel about it. This personality constantly changes, usually for the worse, but sometimes surprisingly for the better, and it is this personality that is the real object of motorcycle maintenance. The new ones start out as good-looking strangers and, depending on how they are treated, degenerate rapidly into bad-acting grouches or even cripples, or else turn into healthy, good-natured, long-lasting friends.
Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.
What makes his world so hard to see clearly is not its strangeness but its usualness. Familiarity can blind you too.
We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
the ultimate purpose of life, which is to keep alive, is impossible, but that this is the ultimate purpose of life anyway, so that great minds struggle to cure diseases so that people may live longer, but only madmen ask why. One lives longer in order that he may live longer. There is no other purpose.
They had made the mistake of thinking of a personality as some sort of possession, like a suit of clothes, which a person wears. But apart from a personality what is there? Some bones and flesh. A collection of legal statistics, perhaps, but surely no person. The bones and flesh and legal statistics are the garments worn by the personality, not the other way around.
A motorcycle functions entirely in accordance with the laws of reason, and a study of the art of motorcycle maintenance is really a miniature study of the art of rationality itself.
If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government.
The time spans of permanence seemed completely random, he could see no order in them. Some scientific truths seemed to last for centuries, others for less than a year. Scientific truth was not dogma, good for eternity, but a temporal quantitative entity that could be studied like anything else.
The purpose of scientific method is to select a single truth from among many hypothetical truths. That, more than anything else, is what science is all about. But historically science has done exactly the opposite. Through multiplication upon multiplication of facts, information, theories and hypotheses, it is science itself that is leading mankind from single absolute truths to multiple, indeterminate, relative ones.
Lateral knowledge is knowledge that’s from a wholly unexpected direction, from a direction that’s not even understood as a direction until the knowledge forces itself upon one. Lateral truths point to the falseness of axioms and postulates underlying one’s existing system of getting at truth.
He saw philosophy as the highest echelon of the entire hierarchy of knowledge. Among philosophers this is so widely believed it’s almost a platitude, but for him it’s a revelation. He discovered that the science he’d once thought of as the whole world of knowledge is only a branch of philosophy, which is far broader and far more general....more
I love a good YA novel! This was an easy read and a tear-jerker.
My highlights:
So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sadI love a good YA novel! This was an easy read and a tear-jerker.
My highlights:
So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.
“Do you always think this much, Charlie?” “Is that bad?” I just wanted someone to tell me the truth. “Not necessarily. It’s just that sometimes people use thought to not participate in life.” “Is that bad?” “Yes.”
“Charlie, we accept the love we think we deserve.”
“I feel infinite."
My dad had glory days once. I’ve seen pictures of him when he was young. He was a very handsome man. I don’t know any other way to put it. He looked like all old pictures look. Old pictures look very rugged and young, and the people in the photographs always seem a lot happier than you are.
I just hope I remember to tell my kids that they are as happy as I look in my old photographs. And I hope that they believe me.
Dear friend, Do you enjoy holidays with your family? I don’t mean your mom and dad family, but your uncle and aunt and cousin family? Personally, I do. There are several reasons for this. First, I am very interested and fascinated by how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other. Second, the fights are always the same.
Sam and Patrick looked at me. And I looked at them. And I think they knew. Not anything specific really. They just knew. And I think that’s all you can ever ask from a friend.
It’s like when you are excited about a girl and you see a couple holding hands, and you feel so happy for them. And other times you see the same couple, and they make you so mad. And all you want is to always feel happy for them because you know that if you do, then it means that you’re happy, too.
The movie itself was very interesting, but I didn’t think it was very good because I didn’t really feel different when it was over.
At one point two days ago, she was talking about books, and she included a lot of books I had read. And when I told her that I had read them, she asked me very long questions that were really just her ideas with a question mark put at the end. The only thing I could say was either “yes” or “no.”
She also said that people who try to control situations all the time are afraid that if they don’t, nothing will work out the way they want....more
As she spoke, she touched her face, her breast, her stomach, her hips as if they were no longer hers, and showed that she knew everything aHighlights:
As she spoke, she touched her face, her breast, her stomach, her hips as if they were no longer hers, and showed that she knew everything about those women, down to the tiniest details, in order to prove that no one told me anything but told her everything, or, worse, in order to make me feel that I was wrapped in a fog, unable to see the suffering of the people around me.
That year, my fourth year of high school, between studying and difficult readings, I was exhausted, but it was the exhaustion of contentment.
He was absolutely the first person to show me in a practical sense how comfortable it is to arrive in a strange, potentially hostile environment, and discover that you have been preceded by your reputation,
It never occurred to me, as, in fact, it had on other occasions, that she had felt the need to humiliate me in order to better endure her own humiliation.
Get up early, hurry to Mezzocannone, slave all day, go home tired, the thousands of words learned in school packed into my head, unusable.
“Yes, anyone who believes that is lucky: there are people who leave and people who know how to be left.”
I certainly had no particular passion for those subjects, for the real things and people they referred to. I had no training, no habit, only the usual desire not to make a bad showing.
it was impossible for me to accept that he was as profound in confronting the great problems of the world as he was superficial in feelings of love.
I struggled with astronomical geography, with geometry, with trigonometry. It was a sort of race to know everything, when in fact I took it for granted that my inadequacy was constitutional and so couldn’t be eliminated.
How easy it is to tell the story of myself without Lila: time quiets down and the important facts slide along the thread of the years like suitcases on a conveyor belt at an airport; you pick them up, put them on the page, and it’s done.
from what I knew it was easy to deduce how little good it had done her to take Nino away from me.
“Don’t read books that you can’t understand, it’s bad for you.” “A lot of things are bad for you.” “You’re not happy?” “So-so.” “You were destined for great things.” “I’ve done them: I’m married and I’ve had a baby.” “Everyone can do that.” “I’m like everyone.” “You’re wrong.” “No, you are wrong, and you always were wrong.” “You were rude as a child and you’re rude now.”
I understood that she wanted to get everything possible for herself, Stefano, the grocery stores, the money, the house, the cars. And I thought it was her right to fight that battle, which we were all fighting, one way or another.
They considered me impartial, without malicious feelings or passions, sterilized by study.
Gone was the pleasure of re-educating my voice, my gestures, my way of dressing and walking, as if I were competing for the prize of best disguise, the mask worn so well that it was almost a face.
Suddenly I was aware of that almost. Had I made it? Almost. Had I torn myself away from Naples, the neighborhood? Almost. Did I have new friends, male and female, who came from cultured backgrounds, often more cultured than the one that Professor Galiani and her children belonged to? Almost.
Behind the almost I seemed to see how things stood. I was afraid. I was afraid as I had been the day I arrived in Pisa. I was scared of anyone who had that culture without the almost, with casual confidence.
I would always be afraid: afraid of saying the wrong thing, of using an exaggerated tone, of dressing unsuitably, of revealing petty feelings, of not having interesting thoughts.
I recognized in them, father and daughter, what I had never had and, I now knew, would always lack. What was it? I wasn’t able to say precisely: the training, perhaps, to feel that the questions of the world were deeply connected to me; the capacity to feel them as crucial and not purely as information to display at an exam, in view of a good grade; a mental conformation that didn’t reduce everything to my own individual battle, to the effort to be successful.
Most important, I knew that, like Franco, he would soon disappear, and that after all it was better that way, because I didn’t love him, I was with him in the dark alleys, in the meadows, only so that I would feel the fear less.
“Trust yourself: don’t touch a comma, there is sincerity, naturalness, and a mystery in the writing that only true books have.”
I understood that I had arrived there full of pride and realized that—in good faith, certainly, with affection—I had made that whole journey mainly to show her what she had lost and what I had won. But she had known from the moment I appeared, and now, risking tensions with her workmates, and fines, she was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.
I wanted to remain myself, chained to Lila, to the courtyard, to the lost dolls, to Don Achille, to everything. It was the only way to feel intensely what was happening to me. ...more
Someone recommended this book somewhere randomly...I wish I could remember where. I think the context was that they were discussing American novels wiSomeone recommended this book somewhere randomly...I wish I could remember where. I think the context was that they were discussing American novels with Indian protagonists. I really enjoyed this book and it made me cry (in addition to being about what it means to grow up as an Indian person in America, this book is also about dealing with major loss).
I give it 4 stars because I haven't found myself recommending it to many people, so I guess it wasn't *that* amazing.
Highlights:
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Her mother’s conviction that movies continue in some private offscreen world had always been as baffling as it was irrefutable.
Had he really turned into one of those men who thought asking the uncomfortable question proved something about his integrity?
wasn’t much of a conversation anyway, just some sort of weird shared understanding of how it was to always be outside of everything, even your own family, waiting to be seen.
his edicts were always promptly dismissed by the others, giving him the air of a king ruling the wrong kingdom.
“You never try to meet anyone because you think that something is wrong with you,”
this was the feeling that always arose when she left, an unmet urgency, as though she hadn’t really done whatever it was she was supposed to do to make home feel like home again.
Is their need to dominate so much stronger than their instinct to protect?
At the funeral, Amina kept her eyes closed for fear of seeing any one image that would stick too deeply inside, turning the day into something real.
As it turned out, it was not Akhil whom she missed in those first weeks so much as her family, or the family they had been before.
Amina realize suddenly how much she missed her mother. She missed Kamala banging the cupboards in the kitchen. She missed her shouting “Hey, dummies! Rise and shines!” from the bottom of the stairs in the morning. She missed her saying “Oh, really?” when Queen Victoria burped too loudly, like they were having an actual conversation, and how sometimes she would come up and squeeze Amina’s shoulder out of the blue, which used to feel like a poor excuse for a hug but now, in memory, felt like sitting in front of a blazing fire with a world of snow falling outside.
Sanji, her parents from this point on would need her to be more than she had ever been, and along with their need would come her inability to fill it.
if those first days were hard because remembering things about him hurt, these days, the days of forgetting things about him, actually hurt worse.
sometimes a surprise was just the acknowledgment of something you had tried hard to ignore.
At first, it had been strange to see everyone sitting at the same table—like watching a play where she knew too much about all the actors to believe anything they said....more
This book is super addictive. Great read for a vacation.
Although it is definitely plot-drive and not prose-drive, I did have a few highlights:
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"WeThis book is super addictive. Great read for a vacation.
Although it is definitely plot-drive and not prose-drive, I did have a few highlights:
#####
"We’ve already talked to one another at a thousand holiday parties, we have nothing left to say, we are collectively bored, but we don’t want to go back into the January cold; our bones still ache from the subway steps."
"People say children from broken homes have it hard, but the children of charmed marriages have their own particular challenges."
"Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?"
"I can’t recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn’t immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blasé: Seeeen it. I’ve literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore."
"It’s a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters."...more
I gave this book 5 stars because I talked about it for months after I read it. I still talk about it. I read The Circle for my book club and we all agI gave this book 5 stars because I talked about it for months after I read it. I still talk about it. I read The Circle for my book club and we all agreed Mae was not a believable (female) character. But this book isn't really about believable characters. It's about two things:
1) The future of society and technology 2) The experience of being an employee at a large technology company at this point in time
To expand on 1: The Circle seems like a dramatization of what could happen in the future of social media. But it isn't really all that far off. It's an extreme, but all signs point to our society moving in the direction of "total transparency" etc etc.
On 2: this was what got me most riled up while reading this book. The Circle doesn't just expect Mae to do her job, they want her to be her job. And everyone around her (parents, friends, etc) thinks that she has "hit the jackpot" because she works at a well-regarded company. While I don't think the Googles or Twitters are quite as insane as The Circle with requiring employees to use their social networks all the time as part of their evaluation, the lines between work and life are becoming increasingly blurred and I am not sure that is such a great thing. Sure it's great to love what you do. But what if you just like what you do but are made to feel like it is your entire identity? What if you don't really enjoy your work but you stay because everyone in your life makes you feel like you are the luckiest person alive to work at X company? These are real issues and why I think this is a must-read for anyone working in the tech industry today.
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My highlights:
By midmorning that Friday, her aggregate for the week was at 97, and the affirmations were coming from everyone in the Circle. The work was demanding, and the flow did not stop, but it varied just enough, and the validation was frequent enough, that she settled into a comfortable rhythm.
When she graduated from middle school, they’d driven her to Disneyland, not quite understanding that she was too old, and that her going there alone—with two adults, which was effectively alone—was at cross-purposes with any notion of fun.
“I just casually slip it into conversation. My daughter’s at the hottest company on the planet and has full dental.”
“I’m sure she’s got a lot of responsibility.” “And stock options!” her father said. “I can’t imagine what she’s worth.”
“No, in a good way! But I haven’t had time yet to do extracurricular stuff.” Gina tilted her head and cleared her throat theatrically. “That’s so interesting you put it that way,” she said, smiling, though she didn’t seem happy. “We actually see your profile, and the activity on it, as integral to your participation here. This is how your coworkers, even those on the other side of campus, know who you are. Communication is certainly not extracurricular,
Mae, feeling some darkness opening its wings within her, signed off.
Equal access to all possible human experiences is a basic human right.”
That’s probably why I didn’t get in where I wanted to. Don’t let anyone tell you Exeter helps. So many quota spots to fill with people from Pakistan and Fresno, right?”...more
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