The Internet is full of quotes, many of which are from books, and many of which are inspirational. I am one of those crazy people, who refuses to highlight or write in a hard copy of a book, because I just feel like books should be given more respect than that. Therefore, one of the things that I like most about my Kindle, is the fact that I can highlight things without physically marking them and damaging them.
A lot of the time, the quotes that I highlight aren’t necessarily inspirational, but more things that I find easy to relate to, so I felt that I wanted to share of few of those with you.
The Carrie Diaries
Page 9.
“What if I’m a Princess on another planet? And no one on this planet knows it?” That question still kind of blows me away. I mean, isn’t it the truth? Whoever we are here, we might be princesses somewhere else.
I love this quote because it reminds me of a story that I read in a magazine years ago about a guy who spent all of his childhood being bullied for the fact that he has ginger hair. On his travels, the guy visited a country (I can’t remember what country it was) where ginger hair is unknown and his unique hair colouring made him very popular with the ladies. In fact, he ended up staying and marrying a local girl.
The moral of the story – for me, atleast – being that just because people don’t “get you”, doesn’t mean to say that there aren’t people who will – you just haven’t met them yet.
Page 17.
I highlight an equation in yellow, thinking about how useless it is to highlight. It makes you think you’re learning, but all you’re really learning is how to use a highlighter.
When I was studying History at school, we had a teacher who had the idea that just getting us to read entire chapters from Text Books and making notes on each of those chapters was the best way of learning. I don’t agree, because I spent all my time thinking that it was all important. At that age, I just was not very good at knowing which bits to write, so in my naive wisdom I decided to just write out the entire chapters, occasionally missing out paragraphs that I knew were irrelevant. I was absolutely convinced that my teacher would realize what I was doing, when we had to hand in our exercise books to check that we were making adequate notes. However, my exercise book came back with red inking stating how good I was at taking notes! I’d love to know if she really read them, or if she just looked at the sheer volume of how much I had written!
Either way, looking back – I learnt nothing from this exercise, because all it taught me – in my opinion – was how to copy things. I think that I learnt more from answering the questions at the end of the chapter, when I had to prove that I had read it!
Page 78.
“Because life happens to people. Life is bigger than people. It’s all about nature. The life cycle…It’s out of our control!”
This quote scares me a little, because it represents the realisation that whether we like it or not, there are just some things that are going to happen that we will never be able to control. People will get sick, people will die, people will leave us and none of that is their fault, because it’s no ones fault and that is really scary.
Page 201.
“You don’t want to peak in high school. If you do, the rest of your life is a disaster.”
When you watch films or TV shows, or read books about school, the chances are that the unpopular kids are always trying to fit in with the popular kids; to fit in and get invited to all of the cool parties and have everyone realize how awesome they are. When I was at school, I was definitely not popular or cool and I definitely did not get invited to any parties. At the time, that sucked – a lot. However, looking back, I’m really glad, because imagine if life had been awesome back them, and I mean really awesome without any worries or problems, then I’d probably spend the rest of my life looking back and wishing for those five short years of my life. And that is the point: we spend five years trying to be cool and popular among people who won’t even matter at the end of those five years. School seems important, then, but in the grand scheme of things, being unpopular for those five years, is far better than spending the rest of your life wishing to be young again, instead of living it.
Page 384.
I have this theory: If you forgive someone, they can’t hurt you anymore.”
I think that everyone can relate to this. Forgiving someone who has hurt you is one of the toughest things that we have to face. However, being able to forgive them means that we are able to move on, and let go of those festering feelings of anger towards them.
It doesn’t mean that you have to let them back into your life. It just means that you no long dwell on the hurt.
