p. 166, Why do doctors always have to ruin perfectly good fruit by comparing it to life-threatening malignancies?
p. 278, "What if," Tim continues, "you did your best, and that was enough? You gave one hundred percent effort, and even if you didn't reach one hundred percent success, you just accepted it, because there's nothing you can do to change what's already happened?
p. 314, After all, truth is not always a virtue when it is pursued for its own sake or, worse, simply to make its teller feel morally superior.
Church attendance is declining, but this book shows that no one is actually abandoning religion. We all, regardless of where we stand on issues of faith, have turned to other areas of life with religious zeal. We've come to depend on those other parts of life for our identity and as a measure of righteousness, both our own and that of those around us.
p. xvi, While enoughness may not be a direct synonym for righteousness, it's not far off. After all, enough only makes sense if there's some kind of line demarcating it from not enough. It implies a standard of some kind.
p. 37, Real love does not recoil at weakness. That is where it begins. Love without vulnerability is not really love at all. It's more like mutual objectification, where the other person serves as a canvas upon which we project not only our idealized selves, but our spiritual and emotional yearnings.
p. 44, The deluge of parenting resources corresponds more or less directly to the size of our fears, which previous generations would likely classify as paranoia.
p. 49, Those who have never experienced failure lack resilience, sometimes fatally so. Protectiveness does not always protect.
p. 78, In other words, we flee from boredom because of what we encounter there, namely, ourselves.
p. 81, Whatever your conviction or interest, no matter how fringe or toxic, a community exists online that will reinforce it. A few clicks are all it takes to find allies who will confirm the righteousness of your opinions, as well as common enemies to fortify your tribe. It's intoxicating, radicalizing, and more often than not dehumanizing.
p. 91, A less flattering theory for why we prefer the desk to the couch might be that, like technology, our work distracts us from deeper, less manageable realities. Raising children, for example, is a complicated, confusing process, where what you put in as a parent does not always correlate to what you get out.
p. 95, You could say that the cult of productivity worships the god of success, and you wouldn't be wrong.
p. 142, The main challenge at present, she told me, was encouraging her students to think in terms other than those of power - to allow a text to speak about its own concerns, rather than sift it through a preexisting ideology; to sit below it and learn, rather than above it and judge. She felt like she'd succeeded at the end of the semester if she'd given her students another language - any other - to speak in addition to that of oppressors and victims.
p. 149, Indeed, calling others out for virtue signaling can be a mighty convenient way not only of dismissing any public utterance we don't like but also of signaling our own superiority in the process.
p. 158, I come from a family of clergy, and of the countless deathbed visits they've made, not one person has ever wanted to talk politics. Not one! There isn't a liberal or conservative in that hospital room, just a human being.
p. 168, The seculosity of Jesusland seeps in when church turns into yet another venue to establish our enoughness, rather than the only reliable place to receive it.
