Kindle Highlights

Highlights

To most of the students, the education they received at school was only an incidental thing. To them, the overwhelming point of school was to learn how to behave in school. How to contort themselves to the school’s rigid rules. Take, for example, bathroom breaks. No subject was more highly managed than the students’ various excreta. — location: 1641 ^ref-58158

Don’t trust things that are too good to be true. But then she grew up and came to a new conclusion, which she told Samuel in the month before leaving the family. She told him the same story but added her own moral: “The things you love the most will one day hurt you the worst.” — location: 1739 ^ref-7507

“He liked things,” she said. “It’s a classic story. The robber baron gets more stuff, the artist dies with nothing.” — location: 2432 ^ref-11022

“Because when all you have is the memory of a thing,” she said, “all you can think about is how the thing is gone.” — location: 2437 ^ref-53829

Anything in the world might have been another thing incognito. A leaf, a horse, a stone. You could not take them literally, the things of the world. You always had to find the real truth the first truth concealed. — location: 4043 ^ref-49419

Every life has a moment like this, a trauma that breaks you into brand-new pieces. This was — location: 4104 ^ref-25844

“What I’m trying to say is, set big goals. You do not have to settle for marrying a farmer or plumber. — location: 4164 ^ref-50158

Then the boys, too, could know how it feels. — location: 4268 ^ref-8356

This is something you carry on the inside, in a cavity filled with every true thing about you so that there is nothing true left on the outside. — location: 4946 ^ref-3549

The things we love the most are the most disfiguring. Such is our greed for them. — location: 5172 ^ref-15989

Love—real, genuine, unasked-for love—made room for more of itself, it turned out. Love, when freely given, duplicates and multiplies. — location: 6392 ^ref-34324

He wrote it down. The Red Squad was the Chicago PD’s covert antiterrorist intelligence unit that was created in the 1920s to spy on union organizers, expanded in the 1940s to spy on communists, and concentrated now on threats to the domestic peace posed by radical leftists, mostly — location: 6655 ^ref-13078

When you’re bobbing in the ocean, the water does not symbolize wetness. The water is simply there, lifting you up. — location: 8557 ^ref-28029

Why do the best things in life leave such deep scars? — location: 9118 ^ref-9002

What Faye won’t understand and may never understand is that there is not one true self hidden by many false ones. Rather, there is one true self hidden by many other true ones. Yes, she is the meek and shy and industrious student. Yes, she is the panicky and frightened child. Yes, she is the bold and impulsive seductress. Yes, she is the wife, the mother. And many other things as well. Her belief that only one of these is true obscures the larger truth, which was ultimately the problem with the blind men and the elephant. It wasn’t that they were blind—it’s that they stopped too quickly, and so never knew there was a larger truth to grasp. — location: 9417 ^ref-57653

“What’s true? What’s false? In case you haven’t noticed, the world has pretty much given up on the old Enlightenment idea of piecing together the truth based on observed data. Reality is too complicated and scary for that. Instead, it’s way easier to ignore all data that doesn’t fit your preconceptions and believe all data that does. I believe what I believe, and you believe what you believe, and we’ll agree to disagree. It’s liberal tolerance meets dark ages denialism. It’s very hip right — location: 10017 ^ref-12773

Because if you see people as enemies or obstacles or traps, you will be at constant war with them and with yourself. Whereas if you choose to see people as puzzles, and if you see yourself as a puzzle, then you will be constantly delighted, because eventually, if you dig deep enough into anybody, if you really look under the hood of someone’s life, — location: 10284 ^ref-12401

He can prevent his past from swallowing his present. — location: 10292 ^ref-43648

Because her great and constant fear all these years was that if anyone ever came to know all of her—the real her, the true deep essential Faye—they would not find enough stuff there to love. Hers was not a soul large enough to nourish another. — location: 10334 ^ref-39419

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