Kent Carpenter > Recent Status Updates

“Everything we receive is a kind of gift, if we do not take it for ourselves… were I still the boy I’d been, I would have said she owed me for my mercy. But mercy that expects payment is no mercy at all, nor is friendship truly a friendship that stands on debt and gratitude.”

Just found out there’s a movie for this.

The intersection of childhood experience and adult growth is varied, sometimes painful, and often too cyclical.

“People become obsessed because of a desire to subject themselves to tests of character, to seek answers about who they are. Obsessions are, essentially, stories that we—the most and least successful among us—invent about ourselves to get through the day, the week, the decades. The stories are about our lives and the meaning that we, and others, bestow upon them. They give people a sense of purpose…”

“..the generationally wealthy had caught on to the game, had come to play. It was no longer about fishing for fun or for some deeper meaning. The world record was the deepest the meaning got. It was no longer romantic. Or it was, but in a different way.”

Man, it’s like Andy Bernard said, sometimes it’s hard to know when you’re in the good old days.

Apparently famous 20th century writers all loved tarpon fishing in Florida. Also, spending long hours on the water, and then heathen hours late at night, was the recipe to good writing. They say you can’t dare to write unless you’ve first lived..

The back of this book says we’re gonna dive into the desperate yearning of the human condition. Here’s the first quote that rings true for me:

“Nostalgia is not only a longing for some lost past but also a mechanism for coping with the present reality.”

My favorite talking head on YouTube had this as his book of the year in 2025. It’s supposed to emotionally truck the reader, so we’ll see!

It feels like reading Good Will Hunting. So I’m enjoying it!

“The Chantry’s power in torture was never that it found the truth, even when it did. Rather it was that it taught the great to fear, even the Emperor.”

Page 351: “Often I have found that such outsiders cling hardest to those labels that are denied them; thus weak men are the most aggressive and unskilled ones loudest to boast “

Good good stuff. Very Dune inspired and I love it.

“Fear is death to reason “