Home > Author > Michael Finkel
121 " The fact that Longo himself was a skilled liar seemed to engender in him an ancillary condition in which he was distrustful of everyone else’s honesty. "
― Michael Finkel , True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa
122 " He’s a genius with my Prius,” says the co-owner of Left Bank Books, the town’s independent bookstore. The "
― Michael Finkel , The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit
123 " These hermits often wonder how the rest of the world can be so blind, not to notice what we’re doing to ourselves. “I have become solitary,” wrote the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “because to me the most desolate solitude seems preferable to the society of wicked men "
124 " Nature, Knight clarified, is brutal. The weak do not survive, and neither do the strong. Life is a constant, merciless fight that everyone loses. "
125 " The note was brief—three paragraphs, two hundred and seventy-three words, the lines crowded together as if for warmth. "
126 " The life inside a book always felt welcoming to Knight. It pressed no demands on him, while the world of actual human interactions was so complex. "
127 " Unlike other early researchers, according to the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, Asperger felt that autistic people could have beneficial talents, especially what he called a “particular originality of thought” that was often beautiful and pure, unfiltered by culture or discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly every autistic person that Sacks observed appeared happiest when alone. The word “autism” is derived from autos, the Greek word for “self. "
128 " I do have a sense of humor,” Knight said. “I just don’t like jokes. Freud said there’s no such thing as a joke—a joke is an expression of veiled hostility. "
129 " Secrecy is a fragile state, a single time undone and forever finished. "
130 " Suffering is such a deep part of living,” wrote Robert Kull, who lived alone on an island in Patagonia for a year, in 2001, “that if we try too hard to avoid it, we end up avoiding life entirely.” The Tao Te Ching says that “happiness rests in misery. "
131 " Japanese researchers at Chiba University found that a daily fifteen-minute walk in the woods caused significant decreases in cortisol, along with a modest drop in blood pressure and heart rate. Physiologists believe our bodies relax in hushed natural surroundings because we evolved there; our senses matured in grasslands and woods, and remain calibrated to them. A "
132 " Get enough sleep,” he said. He set his jaw in a way that conveyed he wouldn’t be saying any more. This was what he’d learned. I accepted it as truth. "
133 " Christopher Knight, you could argue, is the most solitary known person in all of human history. "
134 " The judge, his counselors, and his therapist, says Knight, speak to him as though he’s a child. Every time he admitted he was struggling, they fed him platitudes. Knight rattles them off: “Oh, it’ll get better. Look on the bright side. The sun will come up tomorrow.” He grew tired of hearing them, so now he keeps quiet. He doesn’t blame anyone—“everyone’s doing their best,” he says in a way that can be construed as arrogant—but following their rules causes him to feel worse. "
135 " I like being alone. My preferred exercise is solo long-distance running, and my job, as a journalist and writer, is often asocial. When life becomes overwhelming, my first thought—my fantasy—is to head for the woods. "
136 " Our whole lives, Jefferies said, are wasted traveling in endless small circles; we are all “chained like a horse to an iron pin in the ground.” The richest person, Jefferies believed, is the one who works least. “Idleness,” he wrote, “is a great good.” For Jefferies, like "
137 " I think that most of us feel like something is missing from our lives, and I wondered then if Knight’s journey was to seek it. But life isn’t about searching endlessly to find what’s missing; it’s about learning to live with the missing parts "
138 " Some philosophers believe that loneliness is the only true feeling there is "
139 " He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. "
140 " But life isn’t about searching endlessly to find what’s missing; it’s about learning to live with the missing parts. "