Mindy Yang

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Mindy.


Loading...
Alain de Botton
“At the heart of sulk lies a confusing mixture of intense anger and an equally intense desire not to communicate what one is angry about. The sulker both desperately needs the other person to understand and yet remains utterly committed to doing nothing to help them do so. The very need to explain forms the kernel of the insult: if the partner requires an explanation, he or she is clearly not worth of one. We should add that it is a privilege to be the recipient of a sulk: it means the other person respects and trusts us enough to think we should understand their unspoken hurt. It is one of the odder gifts of love.”
Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

Alain de Botton
“Our romantic lives are fated to be sad and incomplete, because we are creatures driven by two essential desires which point powerfully in entirely opposing directions. Yet what is worse is our utopian refusal to countenance the divergence, our naive hope that a cost-free synchronisation might somehow be found: that the libertine might live for adventure while avoiding loneliness and chaos. Or that the married Romantic might unite sex with tenderness, and passion with routine.”
“Infatuations aren’t delusions. That way a person has of holding their head may truly indicate someone confident, wry and sensitive; they really may have the humour and intelligence implied by their eyes and the tenderness suggested by their mouth. The error of the infatuation is more subtle: a failure to keep in mind the central truth of human nature that everyone – not merely our current partners, in whose multiple failings we are such experts – but everyone will have something substantially and maddeningly wrong with them when we spend more time around them, something so wrong as to make a mockery of those initially rapturous feelings.
The only people who can still strike us as normal are those we don’t yet know very well. The bet cure for love is to get to know them better.”
Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

Elizabeth Gilbert
“It is in our sleep that we most glimpse the power of spirit. Our minds will speak across this narrow distance. It will be here, together in nocturnal stillness, that we shall finally become unbound by time, by space, by natural law and physical law. We shall roam the world however we like, in our dreams. We shall speak with the dead, transform into animals and objects, fly across time. Our intellects shall be nowhere to be found, and our minds will be unfettered.”
Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

Alain de Botton
“How kind we would be if we managed to import even a little of this instinct into adult relationships – if here, too, we could look past the grumpiness and viciousness and recognize the fear, confusion and exhaustion which almost invariably underlie them. This is what it would mean to gaze upon the human race with love. Esther’s”
Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

Alain de Botton
“There is, in the early period of love, a measure of sheer relief at being able, at last, to reveal so much of what needed to be kept hidden for the sake of propriety. We can admit to not being as respectable or as sober, as even-keeled or as ‘normal’, as society believes. We can be childish, imaginative, wild, hopeful, cynical, fragile and multiple – all of this our lover can understand and accept us for.”
Alain de Botton, The Course of Love

year in books
Lang Leav
7 books | 1,673 friends

Tim Hughes
420 books | 916 friends

Susan C...
1,189 books | 753 friends

Michael...
363 books | 99 friends

Alemsah...
1,039 books | 910 friends

James
6,136 books | 2,411 friends

Justin
1,075 books | 687 friends

Brian H...
317 books | 343 friends

More friends…


Polls voted on by Mindy

Lists liked by Mindy