I LOVED this book - it was a book I got from Amazon Prime and it was really entertaining. I could not put it down. What made it even more interesting is that the novel is based around technology which is becoming an increasingly large center-point of our everyday lives.
Page 128: "You ever notice how the people who most need to see or read something are the most oblivious or resentful of its existence?"
Page 206: "Guilt, he thought, must be the most useless human emotion. Fear alerted one to danger and therefore saved lives. Love altered one to living and therefore improved lives. But guilt - guilt was so uselessly after-the-fact, so absent as a tool of prevention and yet so powerful as a tool of misery. Guilt rotted men in cells and suburbs and churches. Guilt destroyed lives."
Page 261: "My understanding of what ti means to be average has nothing to do with statistics. The average American is truly average only in the ways he falls short of his own potential, particularly when he is motivated by the expectations of others. There is always someone more to the right or left of you, someone more or less attractive than you, someone richer or poorer, someone who claims to know how you should live your life better than you know it. People are average when they are driven by a motivation to fit in. The American challenge, then, is to be oneself- only, exactly, and totally."
Page 262: "Our failure is that we actively resist people who fall outside the status quo and especially those who reach beyond it on purpose. An average American is one who cannot overcome his instinct to view the honest aspirations of others with suspicion."
Page 354: "Manipulating emotions is the most important function of meaningful art. We cannot grown unless we invest our emotions in an idea. Without emotion, nothing takes hold."
Sunday, September 6, 2015
The Kite Runner by: Khaled Hosseini
This book is so good and emotional. I highly recommend reading it. It brought me all types of feels. In fact, I was so into this book that I did not even take the time to highlight anything. There were some great things in this book; however, so read it and remember to highlight and share.
The Joy Luck Club by: Amy Tan
I do remember this book, and after I read the book I watched the movie. Also, I learned that my grandmother who had passed read this book and I found that interesting. Reading was a way to connect us and for me to relate to her even though she is no longer here. It especially seemed appropriate for this book which regards family and generations.
I liked this book - my only complaint is I wanted more. We were given many different stories all connected together and I just wish I knew the endings of the stories; however, I do feel that fragmented feeling was supposed to be there.
Page 15: "She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan- a creature that becomes more than what was hoped for."
Page 15: "And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind."
Page 22: "We all had the same stink, but everybody complained someone else smelled the worst."
Page 22: "Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?"
Page 24: "But to despair was to wish back fro something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable."
Page 72: "A boy can run and chase dragonflies, because that is his nature," she said. "But a girl should stand still. If you are still for a very long time, a dragonfly will no longer see you. Then it will come to you and hide in the comfort of your shade."
Page 165: "Fallen down," she says simply. She doesn't apologize. "It doesn't matter, " I say, and I start to pick up the broken glass shards. "I knew it would happen." "Then why you don't stop it?" asks my mother. And it's such a simple question.
Page 191: "It was only later that I discovered there was a serious flaw with the American version. There were too many choices, so it was day to get confused and pick the wrong thing."
Page 217: "'Now you see,' said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, 'why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy."
This is a good book to read to get a point of view of what it is like from the other side - a younger generation looking at an older generations' perspective and vice versa.
I liked this book - my only complaint is I wanted more. We were given many different stories all connected together and I just wish I knew the endings of the stories; however, I do feel that fragmented feeling was supposed to be there.
Page 15: "She will know my meaning, because I will give her this swan- a creature that becomes more than what was hoped for."
Page 15: "And then she had to fill out so many forms she forgot why she had come and what she had left behind."
Page 22: "We all had the same stink, but everybody complained someone else smelled the worst."
Page 22: "Can you imagine how it is, to want to be neither inside nor outside, to want to be nowhere and disappear?"
Page 24: "But to despair was to wish back fro something already lost. Or to prolong what was already unbearable."
Page 72: "A boy can run and chase dragonflies, because that is his nature," she said. "But a girl should stand still. If you are still for a very long time, a dragonfly will no longer see you. Then it will come to you and hide in the comfort of your shade."
Page 165: "Fallen down," she says simply. She doesn't apologize. "It doesn't matter, " I say, and I start to pick up the broken glass shards. "I knew it would happen." "Then why you don't stop it?" asks my mother. And it's such a simple question.
Page 191: "It was only later that I discovered there was a serious flaw with the American version. There were too many choices, so it was day to get confused and pick the wrong thing."
Page 217: "'Now you see,' said the turtle, drifting back into the pond, 'why it is useless to cry. Your tears do not wash away your sorrows. They feed someone else's joy."
This is a good book to read to get a point of view of what it is like from the other side - a younger generation looking at an older generations' perspective and vice versa.
The Sense of an Ending by: Julian Barnes
Page 107: "Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk."
Page 113: "Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also- if this isn't too grand a world - our tragedy."
Page 113: "Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure."
Page 114: "Start with the notion that yours int he sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary."
I remember reading this book a bit more than the previous book - however, not enough to make any remarks about it. :(
Page 113: "Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn't be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that's something different, more like decoration. perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we're just stuck with what we've got. We're on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn't it? And also- if this isn't too grand a world - our tragedy."
Page 113: "Life isn't just addition and subtraction. There's also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure."
Page 114: "Start with the notion that yours int he sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary."
I remember reading this book a bit more than the previous book - however, not enough to make any remarks about it. :(
I Knew You'd Be Lovely by: Alethea Black
Wow - I have not blogged in 10 months - however, I have still been doing some reading. I feel a little embarrassed to say that I do not even remember reading this book. I looked up the summer and its vaguely ringing a bell - but it's NOT coming back to me. I know I read it because I had saved notes and highlights on my Kindle. I will record that which were my favorite parts in hopes that it will cue my memory to recall the novel.
Page 15: "Love never repeats."
Page 17: "Best of all, it made him feel as if the unspoken in him were connecting with the unspoken in her, and it crossed his mind that this was all chemistry ever was: two people's silent selves invisibly aligning while their noisy selves carried on, oblivious."
Page 60: "Perfection isn't outside us. Perfection is a way of seeing."
Page 63: "And I'm no good at being in love, either," she said abruptly, shifting away from him. She sometimes had a talent for dispelling awkward moments by them even more awkward.
Page 66: "Sometimes you can miss something even when you know it's not for you anymore."
Page 113: "We're all allowed a kind of grace period, she decided, when we can coast along, before we really need to choose a life and summon the determination to live it."
Page 115: "She'd always liked the idea of savings, even if she wasn't particularly keen on its practice. She liked calling it saving, too, because it was like that: you think you're saving something, when actually, it saves you."
Page 162: "When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that you are weeping for that which has been your delight."
Page 171: "Wanting things too much is a form of sadness."
Page 173: "Often it is not even advantageous to know what will be. -Cicero"
Page 177: "Failure is not the enemy," he said. "Even the wrong choices can lead you in the right direction."
Page 177: "When dreams come true, they often don't look like you thought they would. Be prepared for that."
Page 182: "What occurrence is the most standard deviations away from your normal range of experience?"
Page 185: "My mother claims that people show you everything you need to know about them within the first hour of meeting them, it's just that most of us aren't paying attention."
So, this didn't help me remember specifics about the book - but it is kind of funny. As I was re-reading the highlights I made and typing them here, I kept thinking "Oh, I like that." And, it made me smile because of course I liked that, I highlighted it. Ah - its a wonderful thing to know yourself. :)
Page 15: "Love never repeats."
Page 17: "Best of all, it made him feel as if the unspoken in him were connecting with the unspoken in her, and it crossed his mind that this was all chemistry ever was: two people's silent selves invisibly aligning while their noisy selves carried on, oblivious."
Page 60: "Perfection isn't outside us. Perfection is a way of seeing."
Page 63: "And I'm no good at being in love, either," she said abruptly, shifting away from him. She sometimes had a talent for dispelling awkward moments by them even more awkward.
Page 66: "Sometimes you can miss something even when you know it's not for you anymore."
Page 113: "We're all allowed a kind of grace period, she decided, when we can coast along, before we really need to choose a life and summon the determination to live it."
Page 115: "She'd always liked the idea of savings, even if she wasn't particularly keen on its practice. She liked calling it saving, too, because it was like that: you think you're saving something, when actually, it saves you."
Page 162: "When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that you are weeping for that which has been your delight."
Page 171: "Wanting things too much is a form of sadness."
Page 173: "Often it is not even advantageous to know what will be. -Cicero"
Page 177: "Failure is not the enemy," he said. "Even the wrong choices can lead you in the right direction."
Page 177: "When dreams come true, they often don't look like you thought they would. Be prepared for that."
Page 182: "What occurrence is the most standard deviations away from your normal range of experience?"
Page 185: "My mother claims that people show you everything you need to know about them within the first hour of meeting them, it's just that most of us aren't paying attention."
So, this didn't help me remember specifics about the book - but it is kind of funny. As I was re-reading the highlights I made and typing them here, I kept thinking "Oh, I like that." And, it made me smile because of course I liked that, I highlighted it. Ah - its a wonderful thing to know yourself. :)
Wednesday, November 26, 2014
My Age of Anxiety: Fear, hope, dread, and the search for peace of mind by: Scott Stossel
As Andrew Solomon (author of The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression) said, "Scott Stossel has produced the definitive account of anxiety, weaving together science, history, and autobiography. His writing is evocative and often witty, disarmingly intimate, and wonderfully emphatic. This story has needed to be told, and Stossel tells it with edgy frankness."
After reading the book, this description fits perfectly.
I read this book for a research paper I did in my philosophy class, but the topic and book were suggested to me as I struggle with anxiety myself (as most Americans do). Stossel is a wreck but very smart and well researched in the history of anxiety. It was very interesting reading about the evolution of anxiety, as well as, the history of pharmacology is relation to anxiety medication.
As a warning if you have anxiety, reading this book did increase my anxiety a little. However, the end leveled it, not by offering a solution, but by offering hope.
This was a borrowed book, so I could not highlight or write in it, so I was not able to collect as many favorite quotes as usual, although I used post-its to mark pages or paragraphs I thought were interesting.
pg. 58: "He believes medication can be an effective treatment for the symptoms of anxiety. But his view, based on thirty years of clinical work with hundreds of anxious patients, is that at the root of almost all clinical anxiety is some kind of existential crisis about what he calls the "ontological givens" -- that we will grow old, that we will die, that we will lose people we love, that we will likely endure identity-shaking professional failures and personal humiliations, that we must struggle to find meaning and purpose in our lives, and that we must make tradeoffs between personal freedom and emotional security and between our desires ad he constraints of our relationships and our communities."
pg. 111: "Two influential twentieth-century psychotherapists, Albert Ellis and Aaron Beck, the founders of rational emotive behavioral therapy (REBT) and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) respectively, eau argued that the treatment of social anxiety boils down to overcoming fear of disapproval. To overcome social anxiety, they say, you need to inure yourself needless to shame.
pg. 114: "Anxiety about doing something wrong that will lead to social humiliation is quite common. But Ned's fear was interestingly specific: his performance anxiety was only acute when working on patients whom he perceived - based on the kind of insurance they carried- to have social status greater than he did."
pg. 123: "I don't give a shit what you say. If i go out there and miss game winners and people say, "Kobe choked" or "Kobe is seven for whatever in pressure situations," well, fuck you. Because I don't play for your fucking approval. I play for my own love and enjoyment of the game. And to win. That's what I play for. Most of the time, when guys eel the pressure, they're worried about what people might say about them. I don't have that fear, and it enables me to forget bad plays and to take shots and play my game." -Kobe Bryant
pg. 129: "I concede, "I say to my opponent. "I'm sick." And I scurry off the court in defeat. I have not just lost. I have given up. Folded like a cheap lawn chair. I feel mortified and pathetic.... I know: the reality is that no one cares. Which somehow just makes this all the more pathetic."
pg. 138: "On the other hand, British psychiatrists observed that during World War II, as the Luftwaffe rained bombs on London, civilians with pre-existing neurotic disorders found that their general levels of anxiety actually declined. As one historian has written, "Neurotics turned out to be remarkably calm about being threatened from the "skies"-- probably because they felt reassured to discover that "normal" people shared their fears during the Blitz. One psychiatrist speculated that neurotics felt reassured by the sight of other people "looking as worried as they have felt over the years." When it's acceptable to feel anxious, neurotics feel less anxious.
pg. 179: "The bases of mental illness are chemical changes in the brain... There's no longer any justification for the distinction... between mind and body or mental and physical illness. Mental illnesses are physical illnesses." -David Satcher
pg. 214: "... SSRI consumption over the last twenty years has created organic changes in the brains of tens of millions of drug takers, making them more likely to feel nervous and unhappy."
pg. 215: "the pharmacological Calvinists believe that to escape psychic pain without quest or struggle is to diminish the self or the soul; its getting something for nothing..."
pg. 221: "Anxiety, in this view, is a sign that our psyche is trying to tell us something."
pg. 255: "Researchers have found analogous evidence i the descendants of trauma victims: the children and even grandchildren of Holocaust survivors exhibit greater psychophysiologic evidence of stress and axioms arousal -- such as elevated levels of various stress hormones -- than do ethically smiler children and grandchildren of cohorts who were not exposed to the Holocaust."
pg. 255: "It's as though traumatic experiences get plastered into the tissues of the body and passed along to the next generation."
pg. 257: "They fuck you up, your mum and dad. They may not mean to, but they do." -from Philip Larkin, "This Be The Verse"
pg. 277 "Karen Horney writes about how a standard behavioral tic of the neurotic is to reduce himself to nothing - I am such a loser, he says to himself, look at all the obstacles that impede me and the handicaps that confine me; it's a ender that I can function at all - in order to relieve the pressure to accomplish anything. The neurotic secretly (sometimes without even knowing it) nurtures a powerful ambitions to achieve as a means of compensating for a weak sense of self-worth. But the fear of failing to accomplish, or of having his poor self-worth confirmed by manifest lack of achievement despite a sincere effort to succeed, is too unbearable to abide....."
pg. 294: "I've read about the recent findings on neuroplasticity -- about the way the human brain can keep forming new neuronal connections into old age. I tell him that I understand the importance of resilience in combating anxiety. But how, I ask, do I gain the quality?
pg. 309: "Many men are so amazed and astonished with fear, they know not where they are, what they say, what they do, and that which is worst, it tortures them many days before with continual affrights and suspicion. It hinders most honorable attempts, and makes their hearts ache, sad and heavy. They that live in fear are never free, resolute, secure, never marry, but in continual pain: that, as Vives truly said, Nulla est miseria major quam metus, no greater misery, no rack, nor torture like unto it; ever suspicious, anxious, solicitous, they are childishly drooping without reason, without judgment, 'especially if some terrible object be offered, 'as Plutarch hath it."
pg. 309: "There is no greater cause of melancholy than idleness, 'no better cure than business.'"
pg. 310: "As a fat body is more subject to diseases, so are rich men to absurdities and fooleries, to many casualties and cross inconveniences."
pg. 310: "As soon as the human brain became capable of apprehending the future, it became capable of being apprehensive about the future."
pg. 324: "Anxiety is an important component of motivated cognition, essential for efficient functioning in situations that require caution, self-discipline and the general anticipation of threat."
pg. 325: "Saint Augustine believed fear was adaptive because it helps people behave morally."
pg. 329: "Johnson seized on the idea that idleness and slothful habits were breeding grounds for anxiety and madness and that the best way to combat them was with steady occupation and regular habits, such as rising at the same time early each morning."
pg. 332: "The ten critical psychological elements and characteristics of resilience that Charney has identified are optimism, altruism, having a moral compass or set of beliefs hat connote be shattered, faith and spirituality, humor, having a role model, social supports, facing rear (or leaving one's comfit zone), having a mission or mean in life, and practice in meeting and overcoming challenge."
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Gone Girl by: Gillian Flynn
Oh my! What a ride this book is! It was a delight to read something captivating. I could not book this book down and read it in about a day and a half because I also and to sleep, eat, and go to class.
I previously read another of Gillian Flynn's novels without evening realizing it was the same author -- Sharp Objects. Both were very good and I love her writing style. The movie just came out, so I wanted to read it before I saw the movie. I am looking forward to it!
Quotes from Gone Girl:
"I suppose it's not a compromise if only one of you considers it such."
"There's something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold."
"It was enough to be near her and hear her talk, it didn't always matter what she was saying. It should have, but it didn't."
"Amy, I don't get why I need to prove my love to you by remembering the exact same things you do, the exact same way you do. It doesn't mean I don't love our life together."
"I like rules that make sense, not rules without logic."
"But he turned our family life into an endless road trip with bd directions and a rage-clenched driver, a vacation that never got a chance to be fun."
"It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soulmate, because we don't have genuine souls."
"I would have done anything to feel real again."
"I've never understood why that's considered a compliment - that just anyone could like you."
I previously read another of Gillian Flynn's novels without evening realizing it was the same author -- Sharp Objects. Both were very good and I love her writing style. The movie just came out, so I wanted to read it before I saw the movie. I am looking forward to it!
Quotes from Gone Girl:
"I suppose it's not a compromise if only one of you considers it such."
"There's something disturbing about recalling a warm memory and feeling utterly cold."
"It was enough to be near her and hear her talk, it didn't always matter what she was saying. It should have, but it didn't."
"Amy, I don't get why I need to prove my love to you by remembering the exact same things you do, the exact same way you do. It doesn't mean I don't love our life together."
"I like rules that make sense, not rules without logic."
"But he turned our family life into an endless road trip with bd directions and a rage-clenched driver, a vacation that never got a chance to be fun."
"It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person. And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soulmate, because we don't have genuine souls."
"I would have done anything to feel real again."
"I've never understood why that's considered a compliment - that just anyone could like you."
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