Elizabeth > Recent Status Updates

What were her greatest faults? Anger, impatience, stubbornness

“Maybe we will drown or burn or starve one day, but until then we get to choose if we’ll add to that destruction or if we will care for each other.”

“All day I have been readying myself for this not to work…but here is the nature of life. That we must love things with our whole selves, knowing they will die.”

“I have learned how to hold two opposite things in my heart at the same time”

“The trouble with anger is, it gets hold of you. And then you aren’t the master of yourself anymore. Anger is.”…”and when anger is the boss, you get-“…”unintended consequences”.

“She had just wanted to know what it was like to brush up against the dazzling future again.”

“The profound pleasure of figuring things out, then doing them.”

“People do strange things sometimes to remind themselves they’re part of the world, don’t they?

P 188. We are less a who and more a when. We are a moment in time

Where is this note logged?

P 102 - civilization and war are opposite not primitiveness; “sought by fear and persuasion was to force his people to change a choice they had made before their history began, the choice between these two opposites”

P 70 “to exhibit the perfect uselessness of knowing this answer to the wrong question.”

P71 “there’s really only one question that can be answered…and we already know the answer…the only thing that makes life possible is permanent intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.”

P. 19 definition of patriotism; “not love of homeland” but “fear of the other…expressions are political…hate, rivalry, aggression”

“Did you make yourself better today? Did you make someone else better today?” p 74

Surprised by the low reviews. I thought it was a great and hope she writes more.

“wp get to own their lives. They get to feel like their lives belong only to them” p 124

P 66 “eventualities. A good woman can look far down the line and smell what’s coming before a man even gets a sniff of it.”

P 9 “I am in a spot where I can neither be what I always am nor turn into what I could be.”

P 358 “they can’t see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.”

P 336 “the best arguments in the world won’t change a person’s mind. The only thing that can do that is a good story.”

P 319, “you’re studying what makes some people take the living world seriously when the only real thing for everyone else is other people.”

P 84 “the greatest flaw of the species is its overwhelming tendency to mistake agreement for truth”

From the acknowledgments which are interestingly at the beginning: “I went through a period in my life when I had no friends, when the phone never rang, when I thought I would die from loneliness. I know that the real blessing here isn’t that I have a book published, but that I have so many people to thank.”