Status Updates From The Stranger in the Woods

Last year, I devoured Finkel’s Art Thief so I knew this could not disappoint.

He is such a good storyteller! But also—HOW CAN IT THIS BE TRUE?!? I know it is, and it’s insane—“the truth felt stranger than the myth” (31).

“There was the Loch Ness monster, the Himalayan yeti, and the North Pond hermit” (29).

“I am a square peg,” he says. Everybody he encounters, he feels, is smashing at him, pounding on him, trying to jam him into a round hole.”

“Suffering is such a deep part of living,” wrote Robert Kull, who lived alone on an island in Patagonia for a year, in 2001, “that if we try too hard to avoid it, we end up avoiding life entirely.” The Tao Te Ching says that “happiness rests in misery.”

“And anyway, when was a journal ever honest? “It either tells a lot of truths to cover a single lie,” he said, “or a lot of lies to cover a single truth.”

“I’m not used to seeing people’s faces. There’s too much information there. Aren’t you aware of it? Too much, too fast.”

“Do you call the police and tell them there’s been a burglary, that all your D batteries and your Stephen King novel are gone?”😆
Gotta have uncle Stevie’s novel it’s all about priorities!