“Between life and death there is a library,’ she said. ‘And within that library, the shelves go on for ever. Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived. To see how things would be if you had made other choices . . . Would you have done anything different, if you had the chance to undo your regrets?”
“She didn’t tell him that while coal and diamonds are both carbon, coal is too impure to be able, under whatever pressure, to become a diamond. According to science, you start off as coal and you end up as coal. Maybe that was the real-life lesson.”
“Every life contains many millions of decisions. Some big, some small. But every time one decision is taken over another, the outcomes differ. An irreversible variation occurs, which in turn leads to further variations. These books are portals to all the lives you could be living.”
“Thomas Hobbes had viewed memory and imagination as pretty much the same thing, and since discovering that she had never entirely trusted her memories.”
“Maybe in some lives you just float around and expect nothing else and don’t even try to change. Maybe that was most lives.”
“The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything.”
“Maybe even the most seemingly perfectly intense or worthwhile lives ultimately felt the same. Acres of disappointment and monotony and hurts and rivalries but with flashes of wonder and beauty.”
“A Camus quote came to her, right in the middle of it.
I may have not been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.”
“Being aware that everything that could possibly happen happened to her somewhere, in some life, kind of absolved her a little from decisions.”
“Every second of every day we are entering a new universe. And we spend so much time wishing our lives were different, comparing ourselves to other people and to other versions of ourselves, when really most lives contain degrees of good and degrees of bad.”
“And the thing you need to realise is this: the game is never over until it is over. It isn’t over if there is a single pawn still on the board. If one side is down to a pawn and a king, and the other side has every player, there is still a game.”
“That means there are still as many possible lives out there for you as there ever were. An infinite number, in fact. You can never run out of possibilities.’
‘But you can run out of wanting them.”
“We only know what we perceive. Everything we experience is ultimately just our perception of it. It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
“But I suppose, maybe . . . it wasn’t my life. I hadn’t made it by myself. I had walked into this other version of me. I was carbon-copied into the perfect life. But it wasn’t me.”
“It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective.”
“The paradox of volcanoes was that they were symbols of destruction but also life. Once the lava slows and cools, it solidifies and then breaks down over time to become soil – rich, fertile soil.”
Read: November 2020
Therese's Little Corner - Musings of a Millennial 