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The Great Believers

Book by Rebecca Makkai · 15 quotes · Rebecca Makkai, The Great Believers, Life

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The Great Believers Quotes

“Cecily said, "That's the difference between optimism and naivety. No one in this room is naive. Naive people haven't been through real trials yet, so they think it could never happen to them. Optimists have been through it already, and we keep getting up each day because we believe we can keep it from happening again. Or we trick ourselves into thinking it." Richard said, "All belief is a trick.”

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“Yale tried to say some­thing, but didn’t know how to be­gin. It had to do with a walk he once took with Nico and Richard around the Lin­coln Park la­goon, the two of them shar­ing Richard’s Le­ica. It struck Yale that day how they both had a way of in­ter­act­ing with the world that was si­mul­ta­ne­ously self­ish and gen­er­ous—grab­bing at beauty and re­flect­ing beauty back. The benches and fire hy­drants and man­hole cov­ers Nico and Richard stopped to pho­to­graph were made more beau­ti­ful by their notic­ing. They were left more beau­ti­ful, once they walked away. By the end of the day, Yale found him­self see­ing things in frames, saw the way the light hit fence posts, wanted to lap up the rip­ples of sun on a record store win­dow. He said, “I get it, I do.”

BeautyReflectionPresence
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“He was more ab­sorbed with the peo­ple around him, the cou­ples and teenagers and solo film buffs hav­ing per­fectly nor­mal days. He’d had thou­sands of nor­mal days him­self. It seemed such an alien con­cept now, to have a nor­mal day. To walk around obliv­i­ous, just par­tic­i­pat­ing in the world. It seemed un­rea­son­able for any­one to be al­lowed a nor­mal day.”

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“He wanted to spend the rest of his life building Nora's Paris out of sugar cubes, brick by brick. He wanted a one-way ticket to 1920. He thought about Nora's idea of time travel. What a horrible kind of travel, that took you only forward into the terrifying future, constantly farther from whatever had once made you happy. Only maybe that wasn't what she'd meant. Maybe she meant the older you got, the more decades you had at your disposal to revisit with your eyes closed.”

Getting OldLonging For Past
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