I’m the kind of person who would rather get my hopes up really high and watch them get dashed to pieces than wisely keep my expectations at bay and hope they are exceeded. This quality has made me a needy and theatrical friend, but has given me a spectacularly dramatic emotional life.
—Mindy Kaling (Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?)
We both pretended to be suffering from the effects of Walking and Thinking and Elaborate Thought at the Same Time (Einstein suffered from it, Darwin, de Sade too), and hence the person suffered from an obliviousness toward his/her immediate surroundings that approached that of a temporary blackout or complete loss of consciousness (this, though as we slipped past each other, our eyes fell like curtains when a hooker strolls through a prairie town searching for accommodation)
—Marisha Pessl - Special Topics in Calamity Physics
who else is BEYOND excited
Eat, Pray, Love ~ Elizabeth Gilbert
My first book of the summer, finished (finally). She is a marvelous writer, sharing every detail of her life to the point where the reader jumps right in to the story. I have come to the conclusion that I am a music novel aficionado so this wasn’t quite my cup of tea, but it was a pleasant book with enjoyable stories.
My favorite of the three parts was Italy, mostly because I have been dreaming of visiting the country every since starting Italian a year and a half ago. Her stories of decadent food left me drooling and dreaming of pasta and pizza and gelato and all other Italian creations. Although her spiritual transformation is inspiring, finishing her story left me with a greater desire to visit Italy than spend four months in an Indian Ashram.
It’s almost as if this book was a perfect summary of my spring semester of classes. Italy brought my three semesters of Italian language study to mind while her four months in Bali were reminiscent of the ethnographies I watched in an anthropology course. Consistent with my professor’s knowledge, Gilbert painted an accurate picture of the imperfections of Bali, otherwise considered a perfect Utopia to the tourists of the Western world.
I will say that the acclaim and success of this book is well deserved, just not quite my ideal read.
Whenever you feel like criticizing anyone, just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (via quote-book)
Most people consider forgetting stuff to be a normal part of living. However, I see it as a huge problem; in a way, there’s nothing I fear more. The strength of your memory dictates the size of your reality. And since objective reality is fixed, all we can do is try to experience—to consume—as much of that fixed reality as possible. This can only be done by living in the moment (which I never do) or by exhaustively filing away former moments for later recall (which I do all the time).
—
Chuck Klosterman: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
He and I are soulmates (not in the romantic sense, in the twin souls sense)
But whenever I meet dynamic, nonretarded Americans, I notice that they all seem to share a single unifying characteristic: the inability to experience the kind of mind-blowing, transcendent romantic relationship they perceive to be a normal part of living. And someone needs to take the fall for this. So instead of blaming no one for this (which is kind of cowardly) or blaming everyone (which is kind of meaningless), I’m going to blame John Cusack.
—Chuck Klosterman: Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
“I myself have never been able to figure out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat.”
— Zadie Smith, On Beauty
***It’s been pointed out this quote was originated by Rebecca West, and reproduced in On Beauty. Sorry for any confusion!
If given a choice between interviewing someone or talking to them “for real,” I prefer the former; I don’t like having the social limitations of tact imposed upon my day-to-day interactions and I don’t enjoy talking to most people more than once or twice in my lifetime.
—Chuck Klosterman: Eating the Dinosaur
