What Kind of Paradise Quotes

“Never underestimate the power of love to lead you down the path toward willful blindness. Faith in the people you adore doesn’t disappear slowly, with each tiny disappointment; instead, it collapses all at once, like the final snowfall that triggers an avalanche when the weight suddenly becomes too much to bear.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“We are undone by the specificity of our dreams. Reality can never live up to the shining edifices we forge inside our fantasies: Life, in all its confusing complexity, is destined to be a disappointment in comparison. The lottery winner discovers that the riches don’t equal happiness; the longed-for baby is colicky and sour; losing fifty pounds still doesn’t bring you love; winning the election doesn’t trigger societal change. Life is a constant emotional calibration, then: the tiny adjustments we make every day as we come up against our discontents. We ride this seesaw, between hope and disenchantment, seeking some sort of equilibrium.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“I believe that civilization’s path is a pendulum that swings both ways, vacillating between hope and despair, success and failure, and all we can do is hang on for dear life. Because it will never, ever stop.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Sometimes it’s not about either/or but about learning how to manage the complexities of both/and.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Memory is a fickle beast. So often we choose what we want to remember; but sometimes memories choose us. The memories we most want to forget are the ones that fold themselves into our subconscious, waiting until we least expect them to rise up and pinch us tight in their talons.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Sometimes love manifests itself as a kind of amazed awe, as potent a feeling as any other form of connection: the shock of knowing that you are desired just as you are, no matter how broken you might feel.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Listening to one voice, and one voice only, doesn’t make you a human being. It makes you a parrot.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Life is a constant emotional calibration, then: the tiny adjustments we make every day as we come up against our discontents. We ride this seesaw, between hope and disenchantment,”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“We are undone by the specificity of our dreams.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Damage is hard to undo once it’s done.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“when you have too much to say and no particular words to articulate any of it.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“The irony, of course, is that kids believe that knowledge unlocks happiness. More than anything, they crave access to all the things that they aren’t supposed to know yet; as if being privy to the secrets of the world will open up some magical door to adulthood. They believe that if you know, you will understand. But in fact, the opposite is true. The more you come to know about the world, the less it makes sense; and the more you wish you could just climb right back inside your mother’s arms and hide there, an oblivious kid, forever.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“My father was a brilliant philosopher king, the benevolent ruler of our tranquil domain; or he was a tyrant, a maniac, and a menace. My life was bucolic and happy; or it was bizarre and lonely. Which is true? Is it possible it could be both? The more I seek clarity, the more entangled and confused my recollections become. So let’s start by focusing on facts.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Companionship is a crutch. Learning to be alone is the most critical life skill of all...when you rely on other people, for emotional support or intellectual engagement or entertainment or just survival, you are weak. You are vulnerable. Because it means that you will suffer when it's taken away - and it inevitably will be, You should never rely on anyone.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Life is amazing. Right? It’s easy to forget it, but then you have these moments that remind you how incredible it is that we even fucking exist. The rest of it—all the crap we worry about, the cerebral contortions we go through to try to make meaning of existence—is nothing at all compared to the miracle that we can do this. Just being together with other human beings. Dancing. Alive.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Once upon a time, the world economy was built on concrete things, objects with longevity that could be held in your hand. But that day I was witnessing the beginning of the era of ephemerality, a whole new kind of existence based on little more than zeros and ones, ideas and information. The kids in this room were igniting the fire that was about to immolate everything that had come before. They were revolutionaries who couldn’t anticipate the scale of their victory, or the devastation it would leave in its wake.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Names are easy to slip on and off, like an ill-fitting suit. I’ve gone through so many. Personal identity, however—that’s a whole different story. Identity is far harder to change.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“the weather in San Francisco was warmer than in Montana; and yet I felt the cold here in a way I never had back home. It was a creeping damp that pressed through my clothes”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Anarchist Cookbook”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“The longing for love is a flawed piece of human coding. It scrambles every circuit in your brain”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Books everywhere, none that I had ever read before, with titles like Neuromancer and Infinite Jest and Society of the Spectacle and Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic. I riffled through a few and then decided to borrow one of the more interesting-sounding novels, a fat book called Snow Crash. It would be my first science fiction, but not my last. Even”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“The irony”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“I was pretty sure this would be plenty to start a new life in San Francisco and also cover some fries.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“Pity is the most agreeable feeling among those who have little pride and no prospects of great conquests,” I muttered,”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“It was easier just to want the things that he wanted, too, because then I might actually get them.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“He was a Marxist theorist. Italian. My father loved him. Gramsci came up with the idea of cultural hegemony. How the ruling class manipulates ideology to oppress the common man through cultural institutions they control. Government. Education. The media.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“We are undone by the specificty of our dreams.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“But this was California in the nineties, when it was your civic duty to drink at least one carrot-apple-ginger juice a week, ideally with a wheatgrass booster.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise

“I’ve learned, over the years, that it’s impossible to explain the beauty of coding to someone who is not, themselves, a coder. Looking at the source of a website or a game or a piece of software is a lot like turning over an elaborate piece of embroidery and seeing the complicated tangle of the threads beneath: Only a certain kind of mind is interested in the complex logic of that mess, rather than the tidy end result. The cause, rather than the effect. Learning to code HTML that week made me understand something vital about myself: I may have spent most of my life thus far observing and consuming and regurgitating (my father’s thoughts, mostly), but what truly brought me joy was making something happen. Learning the secret language that allowed me to speak to the computer, and then using it to create something from nothing. All I had to do was string together a cryptic arrangement of letters and symbols, and there my private world would be on the screen, my vision magically made manifest. For the first time in my life, I felt like a god.”
― Janelle Brown, What Kind of Paradise