I've been sorting through a lot of my highlights from books. It's funny, and somewhat galvanizing, to see how . . . just truly myself I always am, the nature of the things I highlight. The lines and passages below seem to go together to me, despite being from very different types of books. (I recommend any of them to you!)
"Storytelling itself is also an act of narrowing, of eliminating branching futures, until there is only one way that things were ever going to go." -- Sam Knight, The Premonitions Bureau
"How often we made our worst fears come true, by behaving as though they already were." -- Louise Penny, "A Better Man"
"It feels impossible in the way only possible tasks can seem, when you know that despite the scale of what you must do, it’s not really beyond the realm of possibility to do it, and so it feels impossible because you know you must." -- Brandon Taylor, "Real Life"
"It’s not that we become forgetful as we age, though that’s true, too. It’s that a million things will need to be forgotten along the way if our later forgetfulness is to have any meaning." -- John Darnielle, "Devil House"
"Every man who has ever lived holds tight to the belief that for him alone the laws of probability are canceled out by love." -- John Steinbeck, "The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights"
"But sometimes things of no concern to us show up in our living rooms to stare us straight in the face. Whether we want it or not, we are stalked by foreign things. We mix with these people inside the chaotic Erlenmeyer flask that is the world." -- Un-su Kim, "The Cabinet"
"The possible corresponds in all ways to the future." -- Soren Kierkegaard, "The Concept of Anxiety"
"Happiness is not negated by subsequent pain. But it does make the possibility for future happiness seem dimmer. Every good moment is shadowed by the question of that moment’s longevity." -- Joseph Fink, "Alice Isn't Dead"
"How like science fiction our lives are, she thinks. The alternate universe in which, innocently, ignorantly, we continue to exist as we’d been, unaware that, in another universe, we have ceased to be." -- Joyce Carol Oates, "DIS MEM BER"
"But I still don’t really like the word ‘destiny.’ It’s just a target that people draw after the fact, in the place where the arrow landed.” -- Herve Tellier, "The Anomaly"
If these make you think about anything in particular, I'd love to hear about it.