"I cannot remember the books I've read
any more than the meals I have eaten;
even so, they have made me."
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
"To be honest, I don't know you. I never thought for a moment that the newspapers would tell me everything there was to know about you. Newspaper articles contain facts, but there's no such thing as a fact created by a fact. The truth is what makes facts, but people don't care about that. Intention precedes action. Let's say that someone tries to stab a man to death but accidentally cuts a rope that's wrapped around his neck instead, and he survives. And now let's say someone tries to cut a rope wrapped around a man's neck, but the knife slips and he kills him instead. The first person would be a hero, but the second person would be executed. The world only judges our actions. We can't show our thoughts to other people, and we can't read each other's minds. So are crime and punishment really that valid? Actions are only facts, and truth is always what comes before actions. So what we really need to pay attention to is not fact but truth."
"Then I realized that I had deluded myself into thinking that death only came to those on death row. The truth was that I would also die."
"He had carried me on his back, bought me ice cream, and said he worried about me all the time, but when he saw what was happening to me, his only thought was that he had no idea why. So perhaps the words I didn't know were not an exoneration of sin but rather the antonym of love."
"It hit me tha falling leaves are really a form of death for trees, and yet people travel a long way to look at it and remark on how beautiful it is."
"None of us are entirely good. No one is completely innocent. Some are just a little more good and some are a little more evil. Life gives us the opportunity to decide whether to atone for our sins or continue committing them."
"You could only feel like you were dying if you were alive and were therefore a part of life."
"For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. [...] 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. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say; when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script.
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.
And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soul mate, because we don't have genuine souls.
It had gotten to the point where it seemed like nothing matters, because I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.
I would have done anything to feel real again."
"There is an unfair responsibility that comes with being an only child - you grow up knowing you aren't allowed to disappoint, you're not even allowed to die. There isn't a replacement toddling around; you're it."
"You don't know what's out there, yet you know you'll open it. You'll think what I think: No one bad ever knocks."
"People do what they're supposed to do and then wait for you to pile on the appreciation."
"Amy was toxic, yet I couldn't imagine a world without her entirely. Who would I be with Amy just gone?"
"The world was made up of people putting one foot in front of the other; and a life might appear ordinary simply because the person living it had been doing so for a long time."
"But maybe it's what the world needs. A little less sense, and a little more faith."
"There was no escaping what he had realized as he fought for warmth in the night. With or without him,the moon and the wind would go on, rising and falling. The land would keep stretching ahead until it hit the sea. People would keep dying. It made no difference if Harold walked, or trembled, or stayed at home."
"There is one line of thought according to which all you can truly say of any historical event – even the outbreak of the First World War, for example – is that something happened."
"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."
"Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time."
"History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated."
"How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves."
"Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also – if this isn't too grand a word – our tragedy."
