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A Beginners Guide to Paradise (kindle@netgalley.com)

- Highlight Loc. 63-64 | Added on Tuesday, November 03, 2015, 10:53 PM

What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home. Alain de
Botton, The Art of Travel
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A Beginners Guide to Paradise (kindle@netgalley.com)
- Highlight Loc. 363-64 | Added on Sunday, November 08, 2015, 12:21 AM

Or what if I came to know myself better and didnt like what I found?
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A Beginners Guide to Paradise (kindle@netgalley.com)
- Highlight Loc. 467-72 | Added on Sunday, November 08, 2015, 09:29 PM

but an actual guidebook? I hated how they reduced complex cultural moments into
tidy consumer experiences: Hey, honey, if we leave the genocide museum by three
p.m., we can still get to the basket market before it closes at five. And I hated
the trip-hijacking format of these guides: the concise, spontaneity-smothering
itineraries; the tiny stars raising and lowering expectations for every monument,
museum, or restaurant; the boxed sidebars flattening cultural quirks into three
tidy paragraphs. And I didnt like the way they turned travelers into touristswith
the difference being, as someone said, that the traveler doesnt know what is going
to happen next. Most of all, though, I resented how effectively guidebooks
punctured the illusion that you were onto something new.
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A Beginners Guide to Paradise (kindle@netgalley.com)
- Highlight Loc. 1704-6 | Added on Saturday, November 14, 2015, 10:31 PM

When the sun went down, it simply got dark. If there was a moonrise behind the
clouds, I missed it. I went to my cabin, admitting to myself that I simply didnt
know what kind of life I wanted to live. Only later did I see how that admission
was the first step toward actually knowing.
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A Beginners Guide to Paradise (kindle@netgalley.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2380-85 | Added on Monday, November 16, 2015, 09:57 PM

Have you read The Hedgehog and the Fox, by chance? I said. Its a book about War
and Peace. I havent. Quick question. Do you usually read books about books
youve only started? Sometimes, I guess. Its more of an essay. Isaiah Berlin,
the guy who wrote it, says there are two kinds of people Men and women? He
says there are hedgehogs and there are foxes. Hedgehogs are people who know one
thing really well whereas foxes are easily distracted and find just about
everything interesting. Hedgehogs run the world, but foxes enjoy it more. Im
definitely a fox, she said, and so are you.
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A Beginners Guide to Paradise (kindle@netgalley.com)
- Highlight Loc. 2697-99 | Added on Wednesday, November 18, 2015, 09:51 PM

Id never really understood the appeal of boating for boatings sake. But now I
felt how everything seems to slip away when youre on the water, especially things
like the swirling closeness of a small island, where I presumed constant heat and
limited space make the Venn diagrams of everyones lives overlap a little too
tightly.
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A Beginners Guide to Paradise (kindle@netgalley.com)
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The Size of Thoughts, a collection of essays by Nicholson Baker,

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A Beginners Guide to Paradise (kindle@netgalley.com)
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Well, if you could do anything, what would it be? Id been coming to learn that
this was an essential question. Given that compromises were inevitable, if you
dont start with the ideal, you certainly wont get there. Put another way, people
rarely exceed their own expectations so might as well start big and work backward
from there. And at that momentanything seemed possible.
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A Beginners Guide to Paradise (kindle@netgalley.com)
- Highlight Loc. 3775-78 | Added on Friday, November 27, 2015, 09:04 PM

Its so clichd, I said, this screen saver idea of paradise, but this is pretty
close, right? It is pretty close, she said. And clichd but so what? No one
really thinks paradise exists, do they? Didnt Gauguin paint a lot of his paintings
of the Pacific before he even left Paris? He found, just like everyone finds out
here, that places, peopletheyre always more complicated and more interesting than
we expect.