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Essays in Love

Book by Alain de Botton · 2 quotes · Destiny, Love, Attractive

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Essays in Love Quotes

“From within love, we conceal the chance nature of our lives behind a purposive veil. We insist that the meeting with our redeemer, objectively haphazard and hence unlikely, has been prewritten in a scroll slowly unwinding in the sky. We invent a destiny to spare ourselves the anxiety that would arise from acknowledging that the little sense there is in our lives is merely created by ourselves, that there is no scroll (and hence no preordained fate awaiting) and that who we may or may not be meeting on aeroplanes has no sense beyond that we choose to attribute to it--in short, the anxiety that no one has written our story or assured our loves”

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“Chloe's holiday story was dull, but its dullness was no longer a criterion of judgment. I'd ceased to consider it according to the secular logic of ordinary conversations. I was no longer concerned to locate within its syntax either intellectual insight or poetic truth. What mattered was not so much what she was saying , as the fact, she was saying it. And that I had decided to find perfection in everything she might choose to utter. I felt ready to follow her into every anecdote, I was ready to love every one of her jokes that had missed its punchline, every reflection that had lost its thread. (...) I felt ready to abandon self-absorption for the sake of total empathy, to follow Chloe into each of her possible selves, to catalog every one of her memories, to become a historian of her childhood, to learn of all her loves, fears and hatreds... everything that could possibly have played itself out within her mind and body had suddenly grown fascinating.”

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