B. The Midnight Library A GMA Book Club Pick

The Midnight Library: A GMA Book Club Pick

Highlights

‘Doing one thing differently is often the same as doing everything differently. — location: 449

A person was like a city. You couldn’t let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don’t like, a — location: 647

few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile. — location: 648

She stepped outside, wondering whether a life could really be judged from just a few minutes after midnight on a Tuesday. Or maybe that was all you needed. — location: 683

‘Want,’ she told her, in a measured tone, ‘is an interesting word. It means lack. Sometimes if we fill that lack with something else the original want disappears entirely. Maybe you have a lack problem rather than a want problem. Maybe there is a life that you really want to live.’ — location: 839

that is just one of your possible lives. And one into infinity is a very small fraction indeed.’ — location: 843

‘So, you see? Sometimes regrets aren’t based on fact at all. Sometimes regrets are just . . .’ She searched for the appropriate term and found it. ‘A load of bullshit.’ — location: 896

sometimes the only way to learn is to live.’ — location: 900

you can choose choices but not outcomes. — location: 1107

‘Never underestimate the big importance of small things,’ Mrs Elm said. ‘You must always remember that.’ — location: 1148

The straightforward is never quite what it seems.’ — location: 1174

‘Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. — location: 1382

This must be the hardest bit about being a spy, she thought. The emotion people store in you, like a bad investment. — location: 1586

He’d also observed that part of this success was the product of being alone. ‘I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.’ — location: 1664

The lonely mind in the busy city yearns for connection because it thinks human-to-human connection is the point of everything. But amid pure nature (or the ‘tonic of wildness’ as Thoreau called it) solitude took on a different character. It became in itself a kind of connection. A connection between herself and the world. And between her and herself. — location: 1667

To be part of nature was to be part of the will to live. When you stay too long in a place, you forget just how big an expanse the world is. You get no sense of the length of those longitudes and latitudes. Just as, she supposed, it is hard to have a sense of the vastness inside any one person. — location: 1738

To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple. — location: 1916

The regrets she had been living with most of her life were wasted ones. — location: 2382

the thing that looks the most ordinary might end up being the thing that leads you to victory. — location: 2402

Nora wanted to live in a world where no cruelty existed, but the only worlds she had available to her were worlds with humans in them. — location: 2500

She could tell the kind of person she was from the way people spoke to her. — location: 2506

But entering a life wasn’t the same as entering an emotion. — location: 2527

hypochondriac — location: 2716

she had reached some state of acceptance about life – that if there was a bad experience, there wouldn’t only be bad experiences. — location: 2722

‘You don’t have to understand life. You just have to live it.’ — location: 2756

They had breakfast together. They sat at their kitchen table and scrolled the day’s news and ate sourdough toast and were very much like a living endorsement for marriage. — location: 2982

She realised that you could be as honest as possible in life, but people only see the truth if it is close enough to their reality. As Thoreau wrote, ‘It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.’ And Ash only saw the Nora he had fallen in love with and married, and so, in a way, that was the Nora she was becoming. — location: 3053

most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. — location: 3451

Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. — location: 3453

It is quite a revelation to discover that the place you wanted to escape to is the exact same place you escaped from. That the prison wasn’t the place, but the perspective. — location: 3535

She wasn’t a black hole, she decided. She was a volcano. And like a volcano she couldn’t run away from herself. She’d have to stay there and tend to that wasteland. She could plant a forest inside herself. — location: 3568