p189 “It had something to do with paying attention and the ability to choose what I paid attention to, and to be aware of that choice, the fact that it’s a choice.”

p189 “…I think deep down I knew there was more to my life and to myself than just the ordinary impulses for pleasure…”

p192 “…awareness is different than thinking.” “…I believe, in that I do no really do my most important thinking in large, intentional blocks where I sit down uninterupted in a chair and know in advance what it is I’m going to think about…”

p193 “It’s almost the opposite of awareness, if you think about it. I think this experience of accidental thinking is common, if perhaps not universal, although it’s not something that you can ever really talk to anyone else about becayse it ends up being so abstract and hard to explain.”

p210 “…he was wise enough to be suspicious of his own desire to seem wise…advice — even wise advice — actually does nothing for the advisee, changes nothing inside, and can actually cause confusion when the advisee is made to feel the wide gap between the comparative simplicity of the advice and the totally muddled complication of his own situation and path.”

p214 “Illusion of uniqueness” “There is someone out there with us in the congregation today that is feeling lost and hopeless… she had been stunned and deeply moved…instantly felt a huge, dramatic spiritual change…now suddenly her life had meaning”

p215 “…horoscopes that are specially designed to be so universally obvious that they always give their horoscope readers…that special eerie feeling of particularity and insight, exploiting the psychological fact that most people are narcissistic and prone to the illusion that they and their problems are uniquely special and that if they’re feeling a certain way then surely they’re the only person who is feeling like that.”

p222 “primed experience”

p230 “To experience commitment as the loss of options, a type of death, the death of childhood’s limitless possibility…”

p230 “…the accounting profession to which you aspire is, in fact, heroic… Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is…‘Gentlemen, welcome to the world of reality — there is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth — actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.’”

p233 “Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui — these are the true hero’s enemies…”

p234 “‘In today’s world, boundaries are fixed, and most significant facts have been generated. Gentlemen, the heroic frontier now lies in the ordering and deployment of those facts…’”

p249 “…required screening recruits for a set of characteristics that boiled down to an ability to maintain concentration under conditions of extreme tedium, complication, confusion, and absense of comprehensive info…looking for ‘cogs, no spark plugs.’”

p289 “’…we’re just so extremely pleased to have you on board’…not only was it surprising to be greeted in person with such enthusiastic words, but it was doubly surprising when the person reciting these words displayed the same kind of disengagement as, say, the checkout clerk who utters the words ‘Have a nice day’ while her expression indicates that it’s really a matter of of total indifference to her whether you drop dead in the parking lot outside ten seconds from now.”

p294 “…these were people who did not fidget…” They are dead!

p295 “…America had some vested economic interest in keeping people over-stimulated and unused to silence and single-point concentration.”

p342 “‘Your job, in a sense, with each file is to separate the valuable, pertinent information from the pointless information.’”

p345 “’…Avoid the temptation to think that you always need more information. You can drown in it.'

p370 predictability over superiority or over-achievement

p383 “He imagined that the clock’s second hand possessed awareness and knew that it was a second hand and that its job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate, going no place it hadn’t already been a million times before…”

p390 we teach our kids as infants to need stimulation.

p398 “…the heady enthusiam of childhood had given way in the boy to a realization that the objective of pressing his lips to every square inch of himself was going to require maximum effort, discipline, and a commitment sustainable over periods of time he could not then (because of his age) imagine.” The beauty of naevety.

p439 “…life owes you nothing…”

p440 The key to life is to be able to endure boredom. “If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.”

p470 psych hospital “‘I was a cutter… I didn’t know what I did it. I’m still not sure, except he taught me that trying to analyze it or understand all the whys was bullshit…The doctors were a joke…Even the ones who you could halfway see might be human beings were more interested in your case, not in you…If you said you hated it there and it wasn’t helping and you wanted to leave, they saw it as a symptom of your case, not as you wanting to leave. It was like you weren’t a human being, you were a piece of machinery that could take apart and figure out how it worked…”

p479 “…one of the weird things about being in a psych hospital is you gradually start to feel like you have permission to say whatever you’re thinking…no more smilely masks, no more pretending…”

p490 institutional structure. machine of the institution

p500 You have to own your issues. “…there is a particular kind of stage of life where you get cut off from the, like, unself-conscious happiness and magic of childhood…”