Annabel Lee > Recent Status Updates

It’s getting interesting, and a little bit easier to follow, also maybe cause I am listening to the audiobook while reading the book, so it’s faster and I feel like I am internalizing the story a bit more

A immigrants’ family tumultuous journey navigating culture (folk remedies and pouring oil on Nana’s foot), relationships (how Chin Chin Man left them to go back to Ghana), religion (and how it may be practised in different cultures], racism, identity, parenting, addiction, depression...

It is a hefty book, with no particular climax but explores so many themes in one’s life experience... am loving it...

“Knowledge had to be acquired by hard work; none of it is flung at our head gratis.”

On the unexplainable and complicated feelings that come with love...
“At ten bottom, he is good and I love him for that, but I could love him without it. If he should beat me and abuse me, I should go in loving him. I know it, it is a matter of sex, I think”

“Yes I think I love him merely because he is mine and is masculine... this kind of love is not a product of reasoning and statistics...”

“At first I couldn’t make out what I was made for, ur now I think it was to search out the secrets of this wonderful world and be happy and thank the Giver of it all for devising it. I think there are many things to learn yet - I hope so; and by economizing and not hurrying too fast I think they will last weeks and weeks.”

On education and becoming educated...
“... if you depend on guessing and supposing and conjecturing you will never get educated” vs. proving things with actual experimentation

“Even trying to find out and not finding out is just as interesting as trying to find out and finding out, and I don’t know but more so”

“That is a good sample of the lack of harmony that prevails in our views of things...”

(continued) “And she is colour-mad...none of them is of practical value... but because they have colour and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind over them.
If only she could quiet down and keep still a couple minutes at a time, it would be a reposeful spectacle... I recognised that she was beautiful”

Gosh damn romantic I can’t, shows the proposed inherent diff in the male and female psyche

From Adam’s diary
“Perhaps I ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl, and make allowance. She is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a mystery, a joy. She can’t speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she must pet it and caress it and talk to it and pour out endearing names upon it.”

“That was because the fire had revealed to me a new passion...Fear. And it is horrible! I wish I had never discovered it; it gives me dark moments, it spoils my happiness, it makes me shiver and tremble and shudder. But I could not persuade him, for he has not discovered fear yet, and so he could not understand me”

The art of being fearless, and unfazed in the face of fear.

“It was not good casual art (of using a new big word), still it showed that he possesses a certain quality of perfection. Without a doubt that seed can be made to grow, if cultivated”

Do we humans are seek perfection?