Kiss N' Tell

As I said, definitely didn't make it to book club tonight... but here are a few interesting bits from our latest book, "Kiss & Tell" by Alain de Botton. After the first loooong couple chapters, it became interesting... but I'm still not convinced enough to recommend it. The author is long-winded and writes too much about the actual process of writing the book. Had we actually had our girls' night/book discussion I would have brought up these quotes for discussion. Think about them. Discuss. And if you read it... add your own favs... 

"I don't particularly like London, but at the same time, I think it's granting too much importance to the place you live if you actually move to another one. In the end, all cities are the same, so you might as well stay where you are, where you know how the phone and transport system work, and get on with what matters."

"Anyone who hears a lover account for the demise of their passion will recognize that we are prone to locating the essence of a person in what we publicly dismiss as trivial, yet privately hold as vital. The lover may cite the rejected one's taste in religion, profession or literature, but this lacks the explicative power of the crumbs that follow, namely that the ex happened also to gulp loudly between mouthfuls, did not replace their knife and fork symmetrically and mopped up gravy with a piece of bread, details while one intuitively knows to be far closer to the grounds of the relationship's demise than anything yet outlined."

"Nobody can write the life of a man, but those who have eaten and drunk with him"

"The process of intimacy therefore involved the opposite of seduction, for it meant revealing what risked rendering one most open to unfavourable judgement, or least worthy of love. Whereas seduction was founded on the display of one's finest qualities and dinner jackets, intimacy entailed a complex offer of both vulnerability and toenails."

"We may be forced to identify our lovers from a cripplingly small pool of choices. In trying to explain the more inexplicable love stores, one may have to answer the question, 'Why them?' with the gloomy thought, 'Did you see the others?'"

"Everyone has something to hide, because everyone suspects that if others knew certain things about them they would no longer be loved. Behind our need for privacy lies a fear that we are unacceptable when everything about us is known."

"The more one has to talk to someone, the less one in fact will."

"Strangers to ourselves, we are unreliable autobiographers - and hence render almost impossible the task of our biographers. They are left with the choice of either believing and reporting what their subjects suggest, thereby falling prey to the subjects' fantasies, or doubting and interpreting, thereby risking the addition of their own fantasies to the already muddied picture."