“You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.” “Ideas are like beards. Men don’t have them until they grow up. “The cook hates the waiter, and they both hate the customer,” What’s really important in life is always the things that are secondary. “Talent can be a nice thing to have sometimes.
‘The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.’” “I’m not trying to tell you,” he said, “that only educated and scholarly men are able to contribute something valuable to the world.
Book Highlights To sleep with a woman: it can seem of the utmost importance in your mind, or then again it can seem like nothing much at all. Which only goes to say that there’s sex as therapy (self-therapy, that is) and there’s sex as pastime. There’s sex for self-improvement start to finish and there’s sex for killing time straight through; sex that is therapeutic at first only to end up as nothing-better-to-do, and vice versa.
Book Highlights You see, all the content you consume online and through all the different kinds of media you have at your disposal isn’t useless. It’s incredibly important and valuable. The only problem is that you’re often consuming it at the wrong time. It is in the power of remembering that the self’s ultimate freedom consists.
Book Highlights ninety-nine times out of a hundred, people don’t criticise themselves for anything no matter how wrong it may be. an animal rewarded for good behaviour will learn much more rapidly and retain what it learns far more effectively than an animal punished for bad behaviour. Later studies have shown that the same applies to humans.
Book Highlights And it would show me, once again, that one opportunity leads directly to another, just as risk leads to more risk, life to more life, and death to more death. “It’s a lot easier, she realised, to be on the verge of something than to actually be it. This would still take time.
Book Hightlights A nearby clown blew up a balloon animal, a man bought a rose, a child licked an ice cream cone, and a genuine tradition was born, one I’d never forget: Amy always going overboard, me never, ever worthy of the effort. Happy anniversary, asshole. No, Amy and Go were never going to be friends.
Book Highlights A habit is a routine or behavior that is performed regularly—and, in many cases, automatically. changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years. We all deal with setbacks but in the long run, the quality of our lives often depends on the quality of our habits.
Book Highlights See, despite the book sales and the fame, Bukowski was a loser. He knew it. And his success stemmed not from some determination to be a winner, but from the fact that he knew he was a loser, accepted it, and then wrote honestly about it. He never tried to be anything other than what he was.
Book Highlights But it might have started way later than I think without my noticing anything at all. You see someone, but you don’t really see him, he’s in the wings. Or you notice him, but nothing clicks, nothing “catches,” and before you’re even aware of a presence, or of something troubling you, the six weeks that were offered you have almost passed and he’s either already gone or just about to leave, and you’re basically scrambling to come to terms with something, which, unbeknownst to you, has been brewing for weeks under your very nose and bears all the symptoms of what you’re forced to call I want.
Book Highlights paternal love obviously overestimating progeny’s abilities. Anybody with experience in a shady business does really well in education,’ I fell facedown and landed on a wooden table covered in a white sheet. It had a protruding nail that cut my cheek. Blood covered one side of my face. Sweat drops appeared on my forehead.
Book Highlights When he talks to Marianne he has a sense of total privacy between them. He could tell her anything about himself, even weird things, and she would never repeat them, he knows that. Being alone with her is like opening a door away from normal life and then closing it behind him.