“Nobody sees anybody truly but all through the flaws of their own egos. That is the way we all see ...each other in life. Vanity, fear, desire, competition-- all such distortions within our own egos-- condition our vision of those in relation to us. Add to those distortions to our own egos the corresponding distortions in the egos of others, and you see how cloudy the glass must become through which we look at each other. That's how it is in all living relationships except when there is that rare case of two people who love intensely enough to burn through all those layers of opacity and see each other's naked hearts.”
―
―
“Curiosity is only vanity. We usually only want to know something so that we can talk about it.”
― Pensées
― Pensées
“If you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.”
― Tender is the Night / The Last Tycoon
― Tender is the Night / The Last Tycoon
“Beauty is not who you are on the outside, it is the wisdom and time you gave away to save another struggling soul like you.”
―
―
“Whenever an occasion arose in which she needed an opinion on something in the wider world, she borrowed her husband's. If this had been all there was to her, she wouldn't have bothered anyone, but as is so often the case with such women, she suffered from an incurable case of of pretentiousness. Lacking any internalized values of her own, such people can arrive at a standpoint only by adopting other people's standards or views. The only principle that governs their minds is the question "How do I look?”
― The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
― The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Isabelle’s 2024 Year in Books
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