Цитаты из книги The Life Impossible

Разумеется, в каждый отдельно взятый момент мы так стары, как никогда прежде не были, но с другой стороны — так молоды, как уже не будем.

Разница между даром и проклятием порой всего лишь в том, как на них посмотреть.

Я хочу сказать тебе, что в какой-то момент любой человек — буквально любой — кого-то подводит.

Когда считаешь себя плохой, заканчиваешь плохими поступками.

Мне нравилось смотреть фильмы, которые я видела еще до встречи с Карлом,еще до того, как стала матерью, которые вышли еще до того, как я родилась. Это помогало не существовать какое-то время. Сбежать в мир, в котором еще не появилась моя боль.

‘Do you know how they tell if an emerald is authentic?’ he asked. ‘The imperfections,’ I said. ‘Yes. Exactly. That’s what the woman said in the jeweller’s. It is the opposite of other jewels. With an emerald, the more inclusions, the more cracks and defects, the more beautiful it can be. An authentic emerald is beautiful for its flaws. They call it perfect imperfection. Only a fake emerald can be conventionally perfect.’

I love that word ‘spoiler’, don’t you? The idea that if we know what is about to happen, it takes the enjoyment from it. It’s so strange that we don’t want spoilers in our stories but we seek them in our lives. We want to know we will fall in love, or be healthy, or finish the degree in style, get the good job or the comfortable pension. We want the solution. We want it all mapped out. We want to know everything ends well. We want it all spoiled, with as little mystery as possible.

If you destroy the nature around you, you destroy the nature inside you soon enough.

He was full of pride and shame, ego and insecurity, cold and heat, fear and determination, apathy and passion, reservation and impulsivity, everything and nothing. He was a sitting paradox. A terminally flawed lifeform. He was, in short, a human.

We think we are lonely because we are often blind to the connections. But to be alive is to be a life. To be life. We are life. The same ever-evolving life. We need each other. We are here for each other. The point of life is life.  All life. We need to look after each other. And when it feels like we are truly, deeply alone, that is the moment when we most need to do something in order to remember how we connect.

'I sometimes think people who don't like sentimentality actually don't like feeling anything at all. They prefer to look at the whole world with scorn.'

The beautiful, spiralling, entropic mess we call life.

Indeed, the willingness to be confused, I now realise, is a prerequisite for a good life. Wanting things to be simple can become a kind of prison, it really can, because you end up staying trapped inside how you want things to be rather than embracing how they could be. You end up closed. You end up shutting doors to so many possibilities.

I suppose that is one of the purposes of all reading. It helps you live lives beyond the one you are inside. It turns our single-room mental shack into a mansion. All reading, in short, is telepathy and all reading is time travel. It connects us to everyone and everywhere and every time and every imagined dream.

To properly know mathematics is to know the only thing that can be assuredly known. Politics and sociology and history and psychology have facts you have to interpret. But in mathematics facts are just facts. There is no arguing. There is no left-wing or right-wing algebra. There is no sin in geometry and no guilt in trigonometry.

The point of desperation is often the point of truth. When things are wrong, we need to reach rock bottom in order for change to happen. We sometimes need to feel trapped in order to find the way out. We don’t meet ourselves in the light and air. We don’t understand the radio when the song is playing. We sometimes need to smash the thing to see how it is made.

Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.

People say that love is rare. I am not so sure. What is rare is something even more desirable. Understanding. There is no point in being loved if you are not understood. They are simply loving an idea of you they have in their mind. They are in love with love. They are in love with their loving. To be understood. And not only that, but to be understood and appreciated once understood. That is what matters.