anticipating unpleasant events can minimize their impact (18)

1. gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, but losing control can be worse than never having had any at all (20)

2. the act of remembering involves filling in details that were not actually stored; and second, we generally cannot tell when we are doing this because filling in happens quickly and unconsciously (86)

3. the general inability to think about absences is a potent source of error in everyday life (106)

4. our inability to think about absences can lead us to make some fairly bizarre judgments (107)

5. when we remember or imagine a temporally distant event, our brains seem to overlook the fact that details vanish with temporal distance, and they conclude instead that the distant events actually are as smooth and vague as we are imagining and remembering them (114)

6. when scientists make erroneous predictions, they almost always err by predicting that the future will be too much like the present (122)

7. wonderful things are especially wonderful the first time they happen, but their wonderfulness wanes with repetition. But humans have discovered two devices that allow them to combat this tendency: variety and time (141)

8. we can inspect a mental image and see who is doing what and where, but not when they are doing it. In general, mental images are atemporal (146)

9. if we want to predict how something will make us feel in the future, we must consider the kind of comparison we will be making in the future and not the kind of comparison we happen to be making in the present (155)

10. most people think they will regret foolish actions more than foolish inactions. In the long run, people of every rage and in every walk of life seem to regret not having done things much more than they regret things they did (194)

11. apparently, inescapable circumstances trigger the psychological defenses that enable us to achieve positive views of those circumstances (200)

12. unexplained events have two qualities that amplify and extend their emotional impact. First, they strike us as rare and unusual. The second reason why unexplained events have a disproportionate emotional impact is that we are especially likely to keep thinking about them. **Explanation robs events of their emotional impact **because it makes them seem likely and allows us to stop thinking about them. Uncertainty can preserve and prolong our happiness, thus we might expect people to cherish it. In fact, the opposite is generally the case.  (205)

13. we show a pronounced tendency to recall the items at the end of the series far better than the items at the beginning or in the middle. (221)

14. we don’t just treasure our memories; we are our memories (230)

15. the self considers itself to be a very special person (250)