Quotes to Live By__笔记（一）

Chapter 1: Relationships

Love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.

北岛老师也谈到，幸福是一种能力。

We are more often “good”, not as much from intrinsic virtue as from a lack of opportunity for transgression.

这句真逗。不是不报，时机未到？

Intimacy: the capacity to be rather weird with someone- and the discovery that that’s OK with them. 

The good-enough parent feels sufficiently resourceful inside itself not to hold it against the child, that is it is making a very big deal out of so-called “nothing”. It will follow the child in its excitement over a puddle and in its grief over an uncomfortable sock. It understands  that the child’s future ability to be considerate to other people and to handle genuine disasters will be critically dependent on having had its ample fill of sympathy for a range of age-appropriate sorrows. 

温暖。镜头前老二的起床气，把袜子来回揪扯，一周学习结束后沙发上瘫倒的憨态。慢慢走，欣赏吧。

The more capable a child is of surviving without its parents, the more he or she is at liberty to find them annoying. 

On privileged childhoods: true privilege is an emotional phenomenon. It involves receiving the nectar of love- which can be stubbornly missing in the best equipped mansions and oddly abundant in the bare rooms of modest bungalows.  

Humbling parental realization at adolescence: that, despite the angelic flutterings of the early years, we have, in the end, only brought another human being into the world. 

家里老大遭女生拒，面无愁容地同伙伴商讨生财大计。

The good parent knows that children may well cling for a long while and will never dismiss that natural need for reassurance in pejorative terms. It won’t tell the child to “buck up” and be “good little man” or “young lady who can make me proud”. It will know that those who end up securely attached and able to tolerate absences are those who were originally allowed to have as much dependance and connection as they needed. There will be few requests to be “brave” at the school gates.  

老大、老二表面柔弱。道家有讲：柔弱胜刚强。看孩子的造化吧。

From the school of life.