Days of Distraction
Alexandra Chang
Top 10 Best Quotes
“And from those brief moments I was living with a certainty that I was exactly where I should be, where everything is deeply quiet and deeply alive. I thought about the many aspects in this life that I could not control or understand despite how much I wanted to or tried. How my father’s life, my mother’s life, the lives around me and the figures from the past they are not mine to determine, not mine to map out no matter how much they shaped what I had become however much we were connected. I could only help in small ways, I could listen and piece together and recount. But what was truly mine was only a little, no, a miniscule speck of it all. And while this is a sort of devastation to me, when I knew it would take some time to fully accept, it felt nice at least to be on the way in spite of not knowing exactly how far I had come nor how far I have left to go.”
“A natural response to chaos is the desire for control.”
“❝It is the nature of relationships that they are impossible to fully understand from the outside. Their inner workings both from memories and habits and histories made out of exterior world and from those known only between the two involved that exists only through them and are lost when they are lost to each other. A relationship is particular in the way people are particular. Whatever lesson one can glean from people’s relationships can only be taken in pieces assembled into bare minimal instructions. ❞”
“People will compete and never relax and always try to innovate and achieve until they are so high-strung that the world collapses.”
“It’s not a lack of confidence in oneself preventing people from going after jobs where they don’t meet all of the qualifications, but a lack of confidence in other people’s abilities to view them as capable of doing the job, and therefore hiring them,” said the leadership expert, who had surveyed one thousand people to come to this conclusion. “The main barrier is not a mistaken perception about themselves, but a mistaken perception of what is a real requirement or rule, of how processes like these truly work, and this is especially a problem for women.”
“Colonialism looking and tasting better than it should. And should I be enjoying it as much as I am?”
“It is difficult to parse which parts of me come from my family, from being Chinese, from being Asian American, from being American, from being a woman, from being of a super generation, and from, simply, being.”
“But what the people who say that don’t understand is: when in all aspects of life the odds are entirely against you, it can be worth paying for even a tiny increase in hope.”
“While J is gone, I am afraid of the dark and ghosts. When I wake up in the middle ofthe night and need to pee, I lie there in my half sleep wondering if I can hold it until morning, if it is worth getting up and going through the dark spaces to the bathroom. There are more embarrassing fears than this. Like of aliens and downs and mind control by radio waves. I curse Nickelodeon's Are You Afraid ofthe Dark? The answer to which was a resounding yes for '90s children nationwide. Don't be ridiculous, I tell myself. Still, I turn on the bedroom light, then the living room light, then the kitchen light, then the bathroom light. And when I turn off each light behind me, I walk faster toward the lighted areas, until I am back in bed, head under the blanket, having a very difficult time getting back to sleep.”
“What greater loneliness and longing is there than living with someone you once knew so well, and who is now hardly around?”
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Book Keywords:
relationships, realization, life, habits, memories, love-hurts, isolation
