I just finished yet another book. I am going to continue my tradition of pulling out the most meaningful excerpts and putting them up here for you!
”I thought of all the people I knew who spent many of their waking hours feeling sorry for themselves. How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day.”
“We will hold hands, and there’ll be a lot of love passing between us. Ted, we’ve had thirty-five years of friendship. You don’t need speech or hearing to feel that.”
“There’s a better approach. To know you’re going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time. That’s better. That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you’re living… Is today the day? Am I ready? Am I doing all I need to do? Am I being the person I want to be?”
“We really don’t experience the world fully, because we’re half-asleep, doing things we automatically think we have to do.”
“If you’ve found meaning in your life, you don’t want to go back. You want to go forward. You want to see more, do more.”
“People haven’t found meaning in their lives, so they’re running all the time looking for it. They think the next car, the next house, the next job. Then they find those thigs are empty, too, and they keep running. Once you start running, I said, it’s hard to slow yourself down.”
“There are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don’t respect the other person, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don’t know how to compromise, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can’t talk openly about what goes on between you, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don’t have a common set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike.”
“People are only mean when they’re threatened, and that’s what our culture does. That’s what our economy does. Even people who have jobs in our community are threatened, because they worry about losing them. And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself. You start making money a god. It is all part of this culture.”
“I don’t mean you disregard every rule of you community. I don’t go around naked, for example. I don’t run through red lights. The little things, I can obey. But the big things–how we think, what we value–those you must choose yourself. You can’t let anyone–or any society–determine those for you.”
“Every society has its own problems. The way to do it, I think, isn’t to run away. You have to work at creating your own culture.”
“If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one big human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own.”
It was a great book and not as spiritual as the last few, but very life-focused. And life-focused on the way I feel we should be trying to live these days. Enjoy!
::SA
