October

• Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Big Questions from Tiny Mortals about Death / Caitlin Doughty – 2019.
  • status: completed
  • comment: Funny and educational. I can listen to the author talk about death for a long time. The book deserves a space in a school library's collection.
  • "Here's the deal: It's normal to be curious about death. But as people grow up, they internalize this idea that wondering about death is "morbid" or "weird." They grow scared, and criticize other people's interest in the topic to keep from having to confront death themselves."
  • "To be fair, death is hard! We love someone and then they die. It feels unfair. Sometimes death can be violent, sudden, and unbearably sad. But it's also reality, and reality doesn't change just because you don't like it."
• I'm Thinking of Ending Things / Iain Reid – 2016.
  • status: reading
  • "Sometimes a thought is closer to the truth, to reality, than any action. You can say anything, you can do anything, but you can't fake a thought."
  • "How do we know when something is menacing? What cues us that something is not innocent? Instinct always trumps reason."
  • "I think a lot of what we learn about others isn't what they tell us. It's what we observe. People can tell us anything they want."
  • "Hey, do you think secrets are inherently unfair, or bad or immoral in a relationship?"..."I don't know. It would depend on the secret. Is it significant? Is there more than one secret? How many are there? And what is being hidden? All relationships have secrets, though, don't you think? Even in lifelong relationships, and fifty-year marriages, there are secrets."
  • "The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world's answer."
  • "Reality only happens once."
  • "The most attractive thing in the world is the combination of confidence and self-consciousness. Blended together in the proper amounts. Too much of either and all is lost."
  • "I think that's why so many people rush into marriage and stay in shitty relationships, regardless of age, because they aren't comfortable being alone."
  • "Forfeiting solitude, independence, is a much greater sacrifice than most of us realize. Sharing a habitat, a life, is for sure harder than being alone. In fact, coupled living seems virtually impossible, doesn't it? To find another person to spend your life with? To age with and change with? To see every day, to respond to their moods and needs?"
  • "Is intelligence always good? I wonder. What if intelligence is wasted? What if intelligence leads to more loneliness rather than fulfillment? What if instead of productivity and clarity, it generates pain, isolation, and regret?"
  • "It seems reasonable that if one person is disruptive, sleeping alone would be an option."
  • "I've never seen dead lambs before, other than on my plate with garlic and rosemary. It seems to me, maybe for the first time, that there are varying degrees of dead. Like there are varying degrees of everything: of being alive, of being in love, of being committed, of being sure. These lambs aren't sleepwalking through life. They aren't discouraged or sick. They aren't thinking about giving up. These tailless lambs are dead, extremely dead, ten-out-of-ten dead."