Oh hey there,
I took at least one quote from every book I read this year and organized them into themes that made sense to me. Hope there’s at least one quote in here that inspires you to pick up a book:) Follow me on Goodreads here. Enjoy~
Grieving is non-linear, take your time
A person is missing for you, and the whole world is empty
– Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking)
Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it. We anticipate (we know) that someone close to us could die, but we do not look beyond the few days or weeks that immediately follow such an imagined death.We misconstrue the nature of even those few days or weeks. We might expect if the death is sudden to feel shock. We do not expect this shock to be obliterative, dislocating to both body and mind.
– Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking)
We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.
– Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking)
Soundlessly, and without fuss, some tender thing deep inside me broke. Something that, until then, I hadn’t even realized was there.
― Han Kang (Human Acts)
I know why we try to keep the dead alive: we try to keep them alive in order to keep them with us. I also know that if we are to live ourselves there comes a point at which we must relinquish the dead, let them go, keep them dead. Let them become the photograph on the table. Let them become the name on the trust accounts.”
– Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking)
When we don’t allow ourselves to grieve our losses, wounds, and disappointments, we are doomed to keep reliving them. Freedom lies in learning to embrace what has happened.
– Dr. Edith Eva Eger (The Choice)
Grieving doesn’t always mean crying your eyes our and yelling “why, God why” So long as you still miss them, you’re still grieving but that doesn’t mean you’re not getting better. There are no rules to this process.
–Jessica George (Maame)
The most unbearable thing about death is that the world just goes on.
– Fredrik Backman (The Winners)
Your grief is so heavy, when we lowered the. coffin, all the pallbearers fell in too.
-Saeed Jones (Alive at the End of the World)
The only way out is through
Just focus on moving my feet forward, one after the other. That’s the. only thing that matters.
-Haruki Murakami (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running)
…but neither you nor I nor anyone can ever really know whether a story is happy or tragic.
― Won-pyung Sohn (Almond)
Face your life, its pain, its pleasure, leave no path untaken.
― Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book)
As long as you’re breathing, the end remains to be written.
-Rich Cohen (The Fish that Ate the Whale)
Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.
― Johann Hari (Stolen Focus)
Wisdom cannot be imparted. Wisdom that a wise man attempts to impart always sounds like foolishness to someone else … Knowledge can be communicated, but not wisdom. One can find it, live it, do wonders through it, but one cannot communicate and teach it.
― Herman Hesse (Siddhartha)
On Love & Relationships
…we are more than just our genes. We are, in some way, a product of the people who surround us–the people we’re forced to grow up with, and the people we choose to be with later. Our relationships can destroy us, but they can change us, too, and restore us, and without us ever seeing it happen, they define us.
– Robert Kolker (Hidden Valley Road)
There’s often a misconception that to be well-loved, the love has to come from multiple sources, when truthfully, one or two people can love you with the strength of ten. Do you have people in your life who love you with the strength of many?
–Jessica George (Maame)
Above all the other words for love, there ought to be one for this: one that says how many times we’ve come close to losing each other but turn back and start again.
– Fredrik Backman (The Winners)
The things that go unsaid are often the things that eat at you—whether because you didn’t get to have your say, or because the other person never got to hear you and really wanted to.
― Celeste Ng (Everything I Never Told You)
And what is love, in the end?…Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?
– Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
There may be significant things to learn about people by looking at what annoys them most.
― Alain de Botton (How Proust Can Change Your Life)
Instead of thinking how you can change yourself in order to please your partner, as so many relationship books advise, think: Can this person provide what I need in order to be happy?
― Amir Levine (Attached)
From what I understood, love was an extreme idea. A word that seemed to force something undefinable into the prison of letters. But the word was used so easily, so often. People spoke of love so casually, just to mean the slightest pleasure or thanks.
― Won-pyung Sohn (Almond)
It’s the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery (the Little Prince)
We accept the love we think we deserve.
― Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything – what a waste!
― Andre Aciman (Call Me By Your Name)
The intimacy of friendship…lies in the sensation of recognizing oneself in the eyes of another. We continue to know our friend, even after they are no longer present to look back at us. From that very first encounter, we are always preparing for the eventuality that we might outlive them, or they us. We are already imagining how we may someday remember them. this isn’t meant to be sad. To love friendship…one must love the future.
-Hua Hsu (Stay True)
“have you eaten?”…”How’s work?” …Underlying those conversations was always s simple question: Are you okay? Even after all this time, they were still worried.
– Ann Hui (Chop Suey Nation)
Take a little bit of the time you’ve unknowingly or knowingly spent awarding good boys for their minuscule deeds, and reward yourself for being enough.
-Shelby Lorman (Awards for Good Boys Quotes)
People think that intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth. When you realize you can tell someone your truth, when you can show yourself to them, when you stand in front of them bare and their response is ‘you’re safe with me’- that’s intimacy.
― Taylor Jenkins Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo)
A well-functioning partnership could easily be seen as a case of reciprocal exploitation. “Both partners may benefit but there’s this inherent tension. Symbiosis is conflict–conflict that can never be totally resolved.
-Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes)
“When you’re looking for love and it seems like you might not ever find it, remember you probably have access to an abundance of it already, just not the romantic kind. This kind of love might not kiss you in the rain or propose marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when you’re happy, and sing All Saints with you when you’re drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you forever. Keep it as close to you as you can.”
― Dolly Alderton ( Everthing I Know About Love)
Even if we can’t understand each other completely, let’s still try our best 🙂
…can any of us ever perfectly understand another person? However much we may love them?
– Haruki Murakami (Men Without Women)
Do you want to understand people? Really understand them? Then you need to know all the best that we are capable of.
– Fredrik Backman (The Winners)
When you read a novel, you are immersing yourself in what it’s like to be inside another person’s head. You are simulating a social situation. You are imagining other people and their experiences in a deep and complex way. So maybe, he said, if you read a lot of novels, you will become better at actually understanding other people off the page. Perhaps fiction is a kind of empathy gym, boosting your ability to empathize with other people…
― Johann Hari (Stolen Focus)
…anybody can look at you. It’s quite rare to find someone who sees the same world you see.
-John Green (Turtles All the Way Down)
I yearn to know the people I love deeply and intimately—without context, without boxes—and I yearn for them to know me that way, too.
― Jennette McCurdy (I’m Glad My Mom Died)
Let that shit go
Maybe the only thing we can do is accept it, without really knowing what’s going on.
-Haruki Murakami (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running)
So in the end maybe that’s the challenge: to look inside your own heart as perceptively and seriously as you can, and to make peace with what you find there.
– Haruki Murakami (Men Without Women)
Letting go gives us freedom, and freedom is the only condition for happiness. If, in our heart, we still cling to anything – anger, anxiety, or possessions – we cannot be free.
― Thich Nhat Hanh (The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching)
And now that you don’t have to be perfect, you can be good.
― John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
You are what you eat
What would happen if we were to start thinking about food as less of a thing and more of a relationship?
– Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food)
Shared meals are about much more than fuelling bodies; they are uniquely human institutions where our species developed language and this thing we call culture.
– Michael Pollan (In Defense of Food)
When chickens get to live like chickens, they’ll taste like chickens, too.
― Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma)
The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.
― Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma)
Think Twice
Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly.
– Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing about Hard Things )
…new thoughts should lead to new choices. New choices should lead to new behaviours. New behaviours should lead to new experiences. New experiences should create new emotions and new emotions and feelings should inspire you to think in new ways.
– Dr. Joe Dispenza (You are the Placebo)
…if you can imagine a particular future event that you want to experience in your life, that reality already exists as a possibility somewhere in the quantum field-beyond this space and time-just waiting for you to observe it.”
– Dr. Joe Dispenza (You are the Placebo)
Sometimes the truth sucks
Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.
– Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation)
You’ll never know the consequences of getting what you want until you get what you want.
– Laurie Woolever (Bourdain )
Your goal should not be to take the something out of it, but to be honest, clear, and effective. Your friend may not appreciate that in the moment, but he will appreciate it over time.
– Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing about Hard Things )
People aren’t overcome by situations or outside forces. Defeat comes from within.
– Banana Yoshimoto (Kitchen)
People say that our worst moments reveal who our real friends are, but of course most of all we reveal ourselves
– Fredrik Backman (The Winners)
Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
― Albert Camus (The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays)
The truth is rarely pure and never simple.
-Oscar Wilde (The Important of Being Earnest)
How to live your best life
You who are living, live the best ilife you can; Don’t count on the earth to preserve memory
– Ai WeiWei (1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows)
Do not look at the past, and do not look at the future. One lives each complete moment like a dance. there is no need to compete with anyone, and one has no use for destinations. As long as you are dancing, you will get somewhere.
– Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga (The Courage to be Disliked)
I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
― Albert Camus (The Stranger)
You can’t change what happened, you can’t change what you did or what was done to you. But you can choose how you live now.
– Dr. Edith Eva Eger (The Choice)
One needs to think not What will this person give me? but rather, What can I give to this person. That is commitment to the community.
– Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga (The Courage to be Disliked)
For the Art & Design Snobs
To conventional culture, I said, art should be a nail in the eye, a spike in the flesh, gravel in the shoe: the reason why art cannot be ignored is that it destabilizes hat seems settle and secure. Change is an objective fact, and whether you like it or not, only by confronting challenges can you be sure you have enough kindling to keep the fire in your spirit burning.
– Ai WeiWei (1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows)
“Every act of creation is an act of destruction.”
– Ottessa Moshfegh (My Year of Rest and Relaxation)
KISS – Keep it Simple Stupid
– William Lidwell, Kritina Holden, Jill Butler (The Pocket Universal Principles of Design)
We never look at just one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves.
-John Berger (Ways of Seeing)
Change your perspective, change your world
…we have a choice: to pay attention to what we’ve lost or to pay attention to what we still have.
– Dr. Edith Eva Eger (The Choice)
I was so absorbed in the things that I couldn’t change, I forgot the most important thing.
-Toshikazu Kawaguchi (Before the Coffee Gets Cold)
We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.
― Herman Hesse (Siddhartha)
What School Doesn’t Teach You
The most important thing we learn at school is the fact that the most important things can’t be learned at school.
-Haruki Murakami (What I Talk About When I Talk About Running)
The first place you live alone, away from your family, he said, is the first place you become a person, the first place you become yourself.
― Ling Ma (Severance)
The usefulness of a cup is in its emptiness
-Shannon Lee (Be water, My friend)
If you wanted to predict how people would behave…you only had to look at their incentives
-Michael Lewis (The Big Short)
The most we can hope for is to create the best possible conditions for success, then let go of the outcome.
― Phil Jackson (Eleven Rings)
…we don’t really learn anything properly until there is a problem, until we are in pain, until something fails to go as planned.
-Alain de Botton (How Proust Can Change Your Life)
Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.
― Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
By asking people for their input early in the process, you help them feel invested in the outcome.
― Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Braden Kowitz (Sprint)
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
― Sun Tzu (The Art of War)
When someone seeks,” said Siddhartha, “then it easily happens that his eyes see only the thing that he seeks, and he is able to find nothing, to take in nothing because he always thinks only about the thing he is seeking, because he has one goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: having a goal. But finding means: being free, being open, having no goal.
― Herman Hesse (Siddhartha)
The world is burning
All war is absurd. For thousands of years, human beings have chosen to settle their differences by obliterating one another. And when we are not obliterating one another, we spend an enormous amount of time and attention coming up with better ways to obliterate one another the next time around. It’s all a little strange, if you think about it.
― Malcolm Gladwell (The Bomber Mafia)
I don’t know what’s worse: to not know what you are and be happy, or to become what you’ve always wanted to be, and feel alone.
― Daniel Keyes (Flowers for Algernon)
Listen, if there’s a hell, we’re in it. And if there’s a heaven we’re already here.
-Mieko Kawakami (Heaven)
So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I’m still trying to figure out how that could be.
― Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
Why do we romanticize the dead? Why can’t we be honest about them?
― Jennette McCurdy (I’m Glad My Mom Died)
“If I can’t feel, if I can’t move, if I can’t think, and I can’t care, then what conceivable point is there in living?”
– Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind)
We often talk of saving the planet, but the truth is that we must do these things to save ourselves. With or without us, the wild will return.
― David Attenborough (A Life on Our Planet)
Some comforting thoughts as the world burns
If you think of someone enough, you’re sure to meet them again
– Haruki Murakami (Men Without Women)
Isn’t that one of the wonders of life? That at the most unexpected moments, on your darkest hours when you are facing the greatest adversity, something wonderful can happen.
-Francois Malby-Anthony (The Elephants of Thula Thula)
the hardness of the world/is allowed to break you sometimes
-Paris Aliakbarkhani (Mean Girl Era)
When Orson Welles said “We’re born alone, we live alone, we die alone”, he was mistaken. Even when we are alone, we are never alone. We exist in symbiosis – a wonderful term that refers to different organisms living together. Some animals are colonised by microbes while they are still unfertilized eggs; others pick up their first partners at the moment of birth. We then proceed through our lives in their presence. When we eat, so do they. When we travel, they come along. When we die, they consume us. Every one of us is a zoo in our own right – a colony enclosed within a single body. A mutli-species collective. An entire world.
― Ed Yong (I Contain Multitudes)
Escaping reality
In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
― Albert Camus, (The Myth of Sisyphus)
The more you travel, you come back home, and you feel like you don’t speak the same language. You’ve had these interesting experiences, and for everybody else, it’s just been another week that’s passed. And maybe they went out to dinner, or saw a movie, or whatever it was they did during that week, but in that week, you’ve gone to, say Kashmir, and you’ve shot all this stuff, and had all these interesting experiences. And there’s a disconnect, and at certain times your friends kind of fall away, because you’re never around and then, when you come back, the stuff that they’ve been doing just seems mundane, and it’s hard to connect. But I don’t think it’s that the travel leads to discontentment. I think it certainly exacerbates it, or allows you to delay addressing it, but I think it’s the discontentment that leads to being drawn to these places.
– Laurie Woolever (Bourdain )
Books took me to places I could never go otherwise. They shared the confessions of people I’d never met and lives I’d never witnessed. The emotions I could never feel, and the events I hadn’t experienced could all be found in those volumes.
― Won-pyung Sohn (Almond)
Just enjoy life unravelling
I think prime numbers are like life. They are very logical but you could never work out the rules, even if you spent all your time thinking about them.
– Mark Haddon (The Curious incident of the dog in the night)
My art cannot be fully explained in words, I told him, for the works are always developing
– Ai WeiWei (1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows)
Anxiety, the illness of our time, comes primarily from our inability to dwell in the present moment.
― Thich Nhat Hanh (The Heart of Buddha’s Teaching)
And in that moment, I swear we were infinite.
― Stephen Chbosky (The Perks of Being a Wallflower)
Everything, everywhere, all at once
We must learn to think of the world not as something that changes in time, but in some other way. Things change only in relation to one another.
– Carlo Rovelli (Reality is Not What it Seems)
Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected.
Also everything returns, but what returns is not
what went away
– Louise Gluck (Winter Recipes from the Collective )
Whether you want to or not. But the place you return to is always slightly different from the place you left.
– Haruki Murakami (Men Without Women)
There is a perversity in the learning process: We look backward at history and tradition to go forward; we can look downward to go upward. And withholding judgement may be used as a tool to make later judgement more sensitive. This is a way of learning from everything.
-Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, Steven Izenour (Learning from Las Vegas)