Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole by Susan Cain

BATB score: 4/10 💧🌼

Okay. I am unsure on whether you wanted this book to be a behavioral economics book or an autobiography; either way the switch of sort confuses things.

Best to: if you are going to read one Susan Cain book, check out “Quiet” instead

Best as: the four humors are melancholic (sad), sanguine (happy), choleric (aggressive), and phlegmatic (calm); feeling alive is to feel all these

Best for: people who experience fluctuations of happiness and sorrow has a higher sense for creativity

Best quotes: “The word compassion literally means ‘to suffer together’”

“Pothos was our thirst for everything good and beautiful. Humans were lowly beings imprisoned in matter, inspired by pathos to reach for a higher reality.”

“[when asking] people to imagine what death would feel like, they mostly described sadness, fear, and anxiety. But their studies of terminally ill patients and death row inmates found that those actually facing death are more likely to speak of meaning, connections, and love.”

“But you have dead people’s goals. Only dead people never get stressed, never get broken hearts, never experience the disappointment that comes with failure.”

“Loving someone means nothing if it doesn’t mean loving some people more than others.”

“The love you lost, or the love you wished for and never had. That love exists eternally. It shifts its shape but it’s always there. The task is to recognize it in its new form.”