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A Partial History of Lost Causes QUOTES

A Partial History of Lost Causes QUOTES

1 " When my father wrote about fate, I think he was writing about the reality that is, when there are so many other realities that could have been. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

2 " Sadness, forever unacknowledged, eventually becomes resentment. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

3 " Sometimes there are things we don't understand even about ourselves. Sometimes we run out of the time to keep trying to unravel them, and we have to sit back and content ourselves with a shrug. But I think there are some things that we'd never understand even if we had forever to wonder. There are things that - even if we had unnumbered lifetimes to think about them - we still wouldn't know. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

4 " We are inscrutable even to ourselves, I suppose. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

5 " My father had a healthy disregard for social conventions: he once let me paint the house windows in rainbows with my watercolor set, to my mother's horror, and he'd clap for trees that he thought were doing a good job of exploding into red during the fall. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

6 " There's an intimacy in listening to somebody's lies, I've always thought--you learn more about someone from the things they wish were true than from the things that actually are. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

7 " But I find something compelling in the game's choreography, the way one move implies the next. The kings are an apt metaphor for human beings: utterly constrained by the rules of the game, defenseless against bombardment from all sides, able only to temporarily dodge disaster by moving one step in any direction. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

8 " I think the only way to properly face doom is to be on time. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

9 " I yawned, which is my cover for everything. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

10 " One can become so sentimental about a person's absence, but it's impossible to be consistently sentimental in his presence - when you're confronted with the quotidian selfishness and silence that, I'm given to understand, comprise most of a life. But we were just so new. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

11 " I will admit it sometimes felt strange to me to make the confession to someone and later catch them laughing, or flirting, or eating a sandwich, instead of tearing at the injustice of it all or sitting quietly at the center of a grand and monstrous grief. The disaster of my life might be only the worst thing another person heard that afternoon; they might have forgotten by dinnertime; they might have been more heartbroken by watching certain movies. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

12 " But all that talk. All those confidences. He shuddered to think about it. At the time, though, he didn't know any better, and he was filled the gleeful lurching and teeth-chattering panic of early and undiagnosed love. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

13 " What you imagine is what you remember, and what you remember is what you’re left with. So why not decide to imagine it a little differently? "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

14 " Thinking more than a move ahead never got me anywhere in life. Only in chess. And even then it was sometimes a burden. I saw fifteen moves ahead once, in Norway, but there was a much easier path to victory, and I missed it. Looking into the future too hard, I've found can be paralyzing. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

15 " There’s an intimacy in listening to somebody’s lies, I’ve always thought—you learn more about someone from the things they wish were true than from the things that actually are. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

16 " Sending them was like sending a probe to Mars—he thought of its insect legs folding up into a squat, its motorized head casting this way and that. You could program it to do what you wanted, but it was no replacement for going there yourself and flinging your fingers into the red sand. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

17 " major export is people who are funny and smart, who have advanced degrees, who read on public transportation. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

18 " RHRC: What is your writing routine? JD: A lot of evasive maneuvering followed by ADHD multitasking interspersed with a few brief stretches of actually sitting still and writing. I would recommend this approach to no one. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

19 " He dreamed about warmth, he later thought, the way incarcerated men must dream about women. "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes

20 " What story do you tell yourself when that enormous certainty is upon you and you scrape up against the edges of your own self? "

― , A Partial History of Lost Causes