2020 has been a trying year but books have been my stalwart companions; they taught me lessons beyond the print on the page. I started with an ambitious reading goal of forty books and ended up reading 68 by the end of 2020! Who would’ve thought lil’ ol’ me, barely able to finish eight books in 2018, would reach these page lengths!
Words have always fascinated me. During summer break in high school I remember closing my eyes and pointing to 10 words at random in the dictionary, then recording their definitions in my coiled notebook (yes, I did this for fun). This year I have categorized my favourites by learning.
PS. Goodreads is a fantastic app to keep track of your reading goals, see what your friends are reading, and access a library of books and user reviews. Add me as a friend if you have an account!
On Identity
Every decision you make contributes to your character and shapes the kind of person you are.
-Ted Chiang (Exhalation)
I am not what has happened to me. I am what I choose to become.
-Brene Brown (Daring Greatly)
I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done in life, any choice I’ve made. But I’m consumed with regret for the things I didn’t do, the choices I didn’t make, the things I didn’t say.
-Trevor Noah (Born a Crime)
Your identity emerges out of your habits. Every action is a vote for the type of person you wish to become.
-James Clear (Atomic Habits)
Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to, Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be
-Shonda Rhimes (Year of Yes)
We tend to think of nourishment only as what we take in through our mouths, but what we consume with our eyes, our ears, our noses, our tongues, and our bodies is also food. The conversations going on around us, and those we participate in, are also food. Are we consuming and creating the kind of food that is healthy for us and helps us grow?
-Thich Nhat Hanh (The Art of Communicating)
On Self/Vulnerability
If you are far away from yourself, how could you ever be close to another?
-Yung pueblo (Inward)
True power is living the realization that you are your own healer, hero and leader
-Yung pueblo (Inward)
If someone does not want me it is not the end of the world but if I do not want me the world is nothing but endings.
-Nayyirah Waheed (Salt)
You can’t let the world into your story, but you can let in the ones that matter the most. And you should.
-Stephen King (On Writing)
Everything needs food to live, even love. If we don’t know how to nourish out love, it withers. When we feed and support our own happiness, we are nourishing our ability to love.
-Thich Nhat Hanh (How to Love)
People want to be understood and to understand but for most of us, our biggest problem is that we don’t know what our problem is.
-Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone)
You need to be someone who makes you happy.
-Jay Shetty (Think Like a Monk)
On Courage
She began to wonder if she had a responsibility to speak because others could not.
-Jodi Kantor, Megan Twohey (She Said)
… you can either be cowardly or you can be brave, but either way you’re going to live. So you might as well be brave.
-Raphael Bob-Waksberg (Someone will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory)
If you must err, do so on the side of audacity
-Sue Monk Kidd (The Invention of Wings)
The scariest moment is always just before you start.
-Stephen King (On Writing)
“Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.”
-Timothy Ferris (The 4-Hour Workweek)
On Suffering
Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don’t hold on to it Don’t be bitter.
-Trevor Noah (Born a Crime)
Be careful, you can get enslaved twice, once in your body and once in your mind
-Sue Monk Kidd (The Invention of Wings)
If you don’t deliberately rewire your mindset, you are destined to repeat and re-create the pain you’ve already endured.
Jay Shetty (Think Like a Monk)
Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty
-Timothy Ferris (The 4-Hour Workweek)
Suffering is not an objective condition in the outside world. It is a mental reaction generated by my own mind.
-Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
On Loneliness
Obviously, we have some hole we’re trying to fill, but doesn’t everyone?
-David Sedaris (Calypso)
There were many ways to be alienated from someone, few to actually belong.
-Brit Bennett (The Vanishing Half)
On Time
We always think there’s enough time to do things with other people. Time to say things to them. And then something happens and then we stand there holding on to words like ‘if.’
-Fredrik Backman (A Man Called Ove)
…how we decide to spend our time may depend on how much time we perceive ourselves to have.
-Atul Gawande (Being Mortal)
On Grieving
The sorry truth is you can walk your feet to blisters, walk till kingdom-come, and you will never outpace your grief
-Sue Monk Kidd (The Invention of Wings)
On Perspective
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.
-Esther Perel (Mating in Captivity)
The space of our lack is also the space of possibility
-Bell Hooks (All About Love)
Don’t grieve for what doesn’t come. Some things that don’t happen keep disasters from happening
-Rumi (The Essential Rumi)
There is no good or bad without us, there is only perception. There is the event itself and the story we tell ourselves about what it means.
-Ryan Holiday (The Obstacle is the Way)
But I’ve come to believe that things happen and you frame them however you choose. What are success and failure other than two sides of the same coin? Trash and treasure. Trial and triumphs. Squint and it’s hard to tell the difference, especially through the lens of time.
-Bobby Hundreds (This is Not a T-Shirt)
Your lack of fear is based on your ignorance
-Liu Cixin (The Three-Body Problem)
…everything can be taken from a man but one thing: …to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
-Victor E. Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning)
Do not be surprised that things have not gone your way: the universe is greater than you…See how small you are next to the mountains. Accept what is bigger than you and you do not understand.
-Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel)
On Relationships
Real love moves freely in both directions. Don’t waste your time on anything else.
-Tiny Beautiful Things (Cheryl Strayed)
Do not expect to receive the love from someone else you do not give yourself.
-Bell Hooks (All About Love)
For more than happiness, what motivates us in relationships is a search for familiarity – and what is familiar is not restricted to comfort, reassurance, and tenderness; it may include feelings of abandonment, humiliation, and neglect
-Alain de Botton (The School of Life)
Love is like a circle. Whatever love you give out, it always comes back to you. The problem is with our expectations. You assume the love you receive will come from the person you gave it to. But it doesn’t come from that person. Similarly, there are people who love you who you don’t give the same love in return.
-Jay Shetty (Think Like a Monk)
The problematic people who emerge reflect your unresolved issues, and they will keep reappearing until you learn the lesson you need to learn.
-Jay Shetty (Think Like a Monk)
In every relationship you have the opportunity to set the level of joy you expect and the level of pain you’ll expect
-Jay Shetty (Think Like a Monk)
What has conveniently looked like a single relationship in fact sits across so many evolutions, disconnections, renegotiations, intervals of distance, and emotional homecomings that he has in truth one through at least a dozen divorces and remarriages – just to the same person.
-Alain de Botton (The Course of Love)
Love is a skill, not just an enthusiasm.
-Alain de Botton (The Course of Love)
Look for the many ways people communicate their love without saying it. Maybe, like the tree, they are supporting you I other ways.
-Thich Nhat Hanh (The Art of Communicating)
On Healing/Forgiveness
Whatever happens to you belongs to you. Make it yours. Feed it to yourself even if it feels impossible to swallow. Let it nurture you, because it will.
-Cheryl Strayed (Tiny Beautiful Things)
We must forgive those we feel have wronged us, not because they deserve to be forgiven, but because we love ourselves so much we don’t want to keep paying for the injustice.
-Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements)
Awareness is always the first step because if you are not aware, there is nothing you can change. If you are not aware that your mind is full of wounds and emotional poison, you cannot begin to clear and heal the wounds and you will continue to suffer.
-Miguel Ruiz (The Four Agreements)
On Purpose
Asking what is our responsibility is perhaps also to ask, What is our gift? And how shall we use it?
-Robin Wall Kimmerer (Braiding Sweetgrass)
It’s not what you do; it’s why you do it that makes the difference.
-Brene Brown (Daring Greatly)
On Kindness
When given the choice between being right and being kind, choose being kind.
-R.J. Palacio (Wonder)
…one day you’ll understand that it’s harder to be kind than clever.
-Brad Stone (The Everything Store)
On Change/Progress
These days, the purpose of quarantine is as much psychological as it is medical: an enforced time-out ensures we pause, consider what we are about to do and deliberately being to transition to a new kind of existence.
-Chris Hadfield (An Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth)
It’s what you’ve done with your time, how you’ve chosen to spend your days, and whom you have touched this year. That, to me, is the greatest measure of success
-R.J. Palacio (Wonder)
My last piece of advice would be to focus not on the result but instead, the process and the journey…And if you love it and are great at it, and passionate about constantly becoming better at it, you will find success no matter what.
-Ali Wong (Dear Girls)
We seek to leave a place cleaner than we found it, people happier than we found them, the world better than we found it.
-Jay Shetty (Think Like a Monk)
We can’t have change without loss, which is why so often people say they want change but nonetheless stay exactly the same.
-Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone)
When we identify where our privilege intersects with somebody else’s oppression, we’ll find our opportunities to make real change.
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk about Race)
…we change when we need to. Necessity is the mother of adaptation.
-Angela Duckworth (Grit)
Act and talk and learn and fuck up and learn some more and act again and do better We have to do this all at once. We have to learn and fight at the same time.
-Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk about Race)
On Wisdom/ Lessons Learned
Never ignore those intuitions. When you feel some slight repugnance about doing something, Listen to it.
-Rumi (The Essential Rumi)
The brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem
-Don Norman (The Design of Everyday Things)
You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
-James Clear (Atomic Habits)
Limit access to your time, force people to define their requests before spending time with them, and batch routine menial tasks to prevent postponement of more important projects. Do not let people interrupt you. Find your focus and you’ll find your lifestyle. If you can’t define it or act upon it, forget it
-Timothy Ferris (The 4-Hour Workweek)
Adversity doesn’t build character; it reveals it.
-Timothy Ferris (The 4-Hour Workweek)
You should always let people underestimate you. Because when people misappraise your intelligence and abilities, they’re merely pointing out their own vulnerabilities.
-Edward Snowden (Permanent Record)
Every book you pick up has its own lesson or lessons, and quite often the bad books have more to teach than the good ones.
-Stephen King (On Writing)
The brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem
-Don Norman (The Design of Everyday Things)
Questions you cannot answer are usually far better for you than answers you cannot question.
-Yuval Noah Harari (21 Lessons for the 21st Century)
Deciding what not to do is as important as deciding what to do.
-Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
On Compassion/Understanding
Recognizing pain in another person is the primary driver of empathy. IT’s the beginning of compassion. And the more vividly pain is expressed, the more clearly it’s articulated, the more compassion it elicits.
-Brandon Stanton (Humans)
When people can’t agree, it’s often because there is no empathy, no sense of shared experience. If you feel what others feel, you’re more likely to see what they see. Then you can understand one another.
-Melinda Gates (The Moment of Lift)
“You have to figure out what success looks like to people what they’re scared about failing at and then you can help them get what they want.”
-Melinda Gates (The Moment of Lift)
…what they believe in what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear.
-James Baldwin (The Fire Next Time)
You are hard on others because we’re hard on ourselves.
-Brene Brown (Daring Greatly)
People don’t change when they are gruffly told what’s wrong with them; they change when they feel sufficiently supported to undertake the change they – almost always – already know is due.
-Alain de Botton (The School of Life)
The more you understand, the more you love; the more you love, the more you understand. They are two sides of one reality. The mind of love and the mind of understanding are the same.
-Thich Nhat Hanh (How to Love)
If you have the impression that you know the other person inside and out, you are wrong. Are you sure that you even know yourself? Every person is as world to explore
-Thich Nhat Hanh (How to Love)
Because no matter how hard a conversation is, I know that on the other side of that difficult conversation lies peace. Knowledge. An answer is delivered. Character is revealed. Truces are formed. Misunderstanding are resolved. Freedom lies across the field of the difficult conversation.
-Shonda Rhimes (Year of Yes)
If someone can’t or won’t listen to you, get him to listen to himself.
Mark Goulston (Just Listen)
On Life/The Future/Uncertainty
Please, just choose impossibility. Choose risk. Choose making mistakes and making memories and making it up as you go. Just choose to embrace whatever time you do have here, because life is finite, and fragile, and it vanishes too quickly. Make it worth it. Make it count.
-Bianca Sparacino (The Strength in Our Scars)
Don’t judge the moment. As soon as you label something as bad, your mind starts to believe it. Instead, be grateful for setbacks. Allow the journey of life to progress at its own pace and in its own roundabout way. The universe may have other plans in store for you.
-Jay Shetty (Think Like a Monk)
Let the small bad things happen and make the big good things happen
-Timothy Ferris (The 4-Hour Workweek)
Our lives are ruled by these small, seemingly ordinary moments that turn out to have improbably large effects.
Ken Liu (The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories)
Every experience you construct is an investment, so invest wisely. Cultivate experiences you want to construct again in the future.
Lisa Feldman Barrett (How Emotions are Made)
Sometimes all you can really do is keep moving and hope you end up somewhere that makes sense.
-Allie Brosh (Solutions and Other Problems)
Very positive!!