├── .eleventy.js
├── .eleventyignore
├── .gitignore
├── .htmlvalidate.json
├── 404.md
├── README.md
├── _data
├── books
│ ├── big-magic.yaml
│ ├── braiding-sweetgrass.yaml
│ ├── deep-work.yaml
│ ├── eat-a-peach.yaml
│ ├── enchantment.yaml
│ ├── eternal-life.yaml
│ ├── four-thousand-weeks.yaml
│ ├── handmaids-tale.yaml
│ ├── how-to-do-nothing.yaml
│ ├── in-the-dream-house.yaml
│ ├── interview-with-the-vampire.yaml
│ ├── keep-going.yaml
│ ├── life-after-life.yaml
│ ├── luster.yaml
│ ├── make-time.yaml
│ ├── mindset.yaml
│ ├── miracle-of-mindfulness.yaml
│ ├── seeking-the-sacred.yaml
│ ├── shrill.yaml
│ ├── tech.yaml
│ ├── the-color-purple.yaml
│ ├── the-mothers.yaml
│ ├── the-nature-fix.yaml
│ ├── the-night-watchman.yaml
│ ├── the-power.yaml
│ ├── the-sentence.yaml
│ ├── tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow.yaml
│ ├── turtles.yaml
│ ├── upstream.yaml
│ ├── ux-strategy.yaml
│ ├── wherever-you-go.yaml
│ ├── why-buddhism.yaml
│ └── you-cant-touch-my-hair.yaml
└── site.json
├── _includes
├── footer.njk
├── head.njk
├── header.njk
├── layouts
│ ├── all.njk
│ ├── default.njk
│ ├── error.njk
│ ├── home.njk
│ └── post.njk
├── pagination.njk
└── post-contents.njk
├── all.njk
├── assets
├── _sass
│ ├── all-page.scss
│ ├── book.scss
│ ├── error.scss
│ ├── global.scss
│ ├── header-nav.scss
│ ├── home.scss
│ ├── layout.scss
│ ├── sass-helpers.scss
│ └── style.scss
├── css
│ ├── style.css
│ └── style.css.map
├── images
│ ├── covers
│ │ ├── big-magic.jpg
│ │ ├── braiding-sweetgrass.jpg
│ │ ├── deep-work.jpg
│ │ ├── eat-a-peach.jpg
│ │ ├── enchantment.jpg
│ │ ├── eternal-life.jpg
│ │ ├── four-thousand-weeks.jpg
│ │ ├── handmaids-tale.jpg
│ │ ├── how-to-do-nothing.jpg
│ │ ├── in-the-dream-house.jpg
│ │ ├── interview-with-the-vampire.jpg
│ │ ├── keep-going.jpg
│ │ ├── life-after-life.jpg
│ │ ├── luster.jpg
│ │ ├── make-time.jpg
│ │ ├── mindset.jpg
│ │ ├── miracle-of-mindfulness.jpg
│ │ ├── seeking-the-sacred.jpg
│ │ ├── shrill.jpg
│ │ ├── the-color-purple.jpg
│ │ ├── the-mothers.jpg
│ │ ├── the-nature-fix.jpg
│ │ ├── the-night-watchman.jpg
│ │ ├── the-power.jpg
│ │ ├── the-sentence.jpg
│ │ ├── tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow.jpg
│ │ ├── turtles.jpg
│ │ ├── upstream.jpg
│ │ ├── ux-strategy.jpg
│ │ ├── wherever-you-go.jpg
│ │ ├── why-buddhism.jpg
│ │ └── you-cant-touch-my-hair.jpg
│ ├── favicon-16.png
│ ├── favicon-192.png
│ ├── favicon-32.png
│ ├── favicon-48.png
│ ├── favicon-62.png
│ ├── favicon.svg
│ ├── screenshot.png
│ └── share-icon.png
├── js
│ ├── deps.js
│ ├── html5shiv.js
│ └── scripts.js
└── svgs
│ ├── big-magic.svg
│ ├── braiding-sweetgrass.svg
│ ├── deep-work.svg
│ ├── eat-a-peach.svg
│ ├── enchantment.svg
│ ├── eternal-life.svg
│ ├── four-thousand-weeks.svg
│ ├── handmaids-tale.svg
│ ├── how-to-do-nothing.svg
│ ├── icons.svg
│ ├── in-the-dream-house.svg
│ ├── interview-with-the-vampire.svg
│ ├── keep-going.svg
│ ├── life-after-life.svg
│ ├── luster.svg
│ ├── make-time.svg
│ ├── mindset.svg
│ ├── miracle-of-mindfulness.svg
│ ├── seeking-the-sacred.svg
│ ├── shrill.svg
│ ├── the-color-purple.svg
│ ├── the-mothers.svg
│ ├── the-nature-fix.svg
│ ├── the-night-watchman.svg
│ ├── the-power.svg
│ ├── the-sentence.svg
│ ├── tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow.svg
│ ├── turtles.svg
│ ├── upstream-complex.svg
│ ├── upstream.svg
│ ├── ux-strategy.svg
│ ├── wherever-you-go.svg
│ ├── why-buddhism.svg
│ └── you-cant-touch-my-hair.svg
├── index.njk
├── netlify.toml
├── package-lock.json
├── package.json
├── posts
├── 2016-07-24-life-after-life.md
├── 2016-07-26-the-color-purple.md
├── 2016-08-06-deep-work.md
├── 2016-08-17-interview-with-the-vampire.md
├── 2016-10-15-you-cant-touch-my-hair.md
├── 2016-11-13-shrill.md
├── 2017-01-16-ux-strategy.md
├── 2017-01-19-handmaids-tale.md
├── 2017-03-19-seeking-the-sacred.md
├── 2017-09-14-the-mothers.md
├── 2018-03-17-the-power.md
├── 2018-06-02-why-buddhism.md
├── 2018-06-15-big-magic.md
├── 2018-12-21-the-nature-fix.md
├── 2019-05-14-upstream.md
├── 2019-05-15-mindset.md
├── 2019-07-04-wherever-you-go.md
├── 2019-07-29-make-time.md
├── 2019-12-01-how-to-do-nothing.md
├── 2020-02-18-miracle-of-mindfulness.md
├── 2020-11-10-eat-a-peach.md
├── 2020-11-15-eternal-life.md
├── 2020-12-26-luster.md
├── 2021-02-28-keep-going.md
├── 2021-09-22-four-thousand-weeks.md
├── 2022-01-15-braiding-sweetgrass.md
├── 2022-07-23-the-sentence.md
├── 2022-09-03-turtles.md
├── 2023-03-16-tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow.md
├── 2023-04-09-in-the-dream-house.md
├── 2023-08-18-enchantment.md
├── 2024-04-13-the-night-watchman.md
└── posts.json
└── robots.txt
/.eleventy.js:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | const yaml = require("js-yaml");
2 | const svgContents = require("eleventy-plugin-svg-contents");
3 |
4 | module.exports = function(eleventyConfig) {
5 |
6 | // Don't try to build pages from these files
7 | eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("assets");
8 | eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("README.md");
9 | eleventyConfig.addPassthroughCopy("robots.txt");
10 |
11 | // Keep highlight data files working after conversion from Jekyll
12 | eleventyConfig.addDataExtension("yaml", contents => yaml.safeLoad(contents));
13 |
14 | // Insert SVG contents
15 | eleventyConfig.addPlugin(svgContents);
16 |
17 | return {
18 |
19 | /* Change value if you'd like to deploy to subdirectory, e.g. "/highlights/"
20 | * Learn more: https://www.11ty.dev/docs/config/#deploy-to-a-subdirectory-with-a-path-prefix
21 | */
22 | pathPrefix: "/"
23 |
24 | }
25 |
26 | };
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/.eleventyignore:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | ./.netlify/plugins/node_modules/
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/.gitignore:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | # ----------------------------------------------------------------------
2 | # | Eleventy |
3 | # ----------------------------------------------------------------------
4 |
5 | _site
6 | node_modules
7 | .env
8 |
9 | # ----------------------------------------------------------------------
10 | # | Netlify |
11 | # ----------------------------------------------------------------------
12 |
13 | # Local Netlify folder
14 | .netlify
15 |
16 | # ----------------------------------------------------------------------
17 | # | Operating system files |
18 | # ----------------------------------------------------------------------
19 |
20 | *.bak
21 | *:Zone.Identifier
22 | *.DS_Store
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/.htmlvalidate.json:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | {
2 | "rules": {
3 | "no-redundant-role": "off",
4 | "no-trailing-whitespace": "off"
5 | }
6 | }
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/404.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | ---
2 | layout: layouts/error.njk
3 | title: Page not found
4 | permalink: 404.html
5 | ---
6 |
7 | This page could not be found in the archives. You can [browse by book](/) or [explore all highlights](/all/).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
/README.md:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1 | # Highlights
2 |
3 | 
4 |
5 | A minisite for book and article highlights: [highlights.melanie-richards.com](http://highlights.melanie-richards.com), built with Eleventy. Highlights and covers are copyright to their respective authors. [Let’s be book friends](https://www.goodreads.com/melanierichards)
6 |
7 | ## To build
8 |
9 | 1. [Install Node/npm](https://nodejs.org/)
10 | 2. Run `npm install`
11 | 3. Run `npx @11ty/eleventy --serve`
12 | 4. Visit `localhost:8080`
13 |
14 | ## To deploy to a subdirectory
15 |
16 | I've chosen to deploy my highlights to the root path of a subdomain, but others might prefer a subdirectory (e.g. `example.com/highlights/`). To do so, change the `pathPrefix` in `.eleventy.js` to specify your subdirectory (e.g. `/highlights/`). You should not need to prepend any `permalink` frontmatter or URLs referenced in templates with this subpath.
17 |
18 | ## Commands
19 |
20 | | Command | Purpose |
21 | | -------------------------- | ---------------------------- |
22 | | npm run start | Serve project + watch Sass |
23 | | netlify build | Kick off a Netlify build locally. Useful for local validation w/ Netlify plugins. |
24 |
25 | ## Data syntax
26 |
27 | ### Book front-page matter
28 |
29 | ```
30 | ---
31 | title: ""
32 | book: dash-separated
33 | author:
34 | kindle: true
35 | spoilers: false
36 | content_warnings:
37 | date: YYYY-MM-DD
38 | bookshop_id:
39 | ---
40 | ```
41 |
42 | * Where "dash-separated" is also the file name for the `_data` file, JPG, and SVG.
43 | * `bookshop_id` is used for bookshop.org buy links. The base template uses my affiliate link structure; feel free to replace with your own or remove these buy links entirely (though it’s nice to support authors!).
44 |
45 | ### Each highlight
46 |
47 | ```
48 | - text:
49 | page:
50 | attribution:
51 | ```
52 |
53 | ### Cover image sizes
54 |
55 | | Image | Width |
56 | | :------------- | :---- |
57 | | Full-res cover | 400px |
58 | | SVG | 200px |
59 |
60 | ## Substantive/breaking changes
61 |
62 | ### Branch rename
63 |
64 | The `master` branch was renamed to `main` in 2020. Folks who have forked the repo can [update their local clones using these instructions](https://www.hanselman.com/blog/EasilyRenameYourGitDefaultBranchFromMasterToMain.aspx).
65 |
66 | ### Migration from Jekyll to Eleventy
67 |
68 | The primary purpose of this repo is to deploy [highlights.melanie-richards.com](http://highlights.melanie-richards.com), though others may feel free to remix the code for their own highlights sites. As of late 2020, according to my current development practices, this site has been converted from Jekyll to Eleventy. If you'd still prefer to use Jekyll instead, you may access [prior releases](https://github.com/melanierichards/highlights/releases) or branch off of [`jekyll`](https://github.com/melanierichards/highlights/tree/jekyll).
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/_data/books/deep-work.yaml:
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1 | - text: "Deep Work: Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate."
2 | page: Location 32
3 |
4 | - text: "Shallow Work: Noncognitively demanding, logistical-style tasks, often performed while distracted. These efforts tend to not create much new value in the world and are easy to replicate."
5 | page: Location 72
6 |
7 | - text: To remain valuable in our economy, therefore, you must master the art of quickly learning complicated things.
8 | page: Location 148
9 |
10 | - text: Two Core Abilities for Thriving in the New Economy 1. The ability to quickly master hard things. 2. The ability to produce at an elite level, in terms of both quality and speed.
11 | page: Location 305
12 |
13 | - text: When you switch from some Task A to another Task B, your attention doesn’t immediately follow—a residue of your attention remains stuck thinking about the original task.
14 | page: Location 442
15 |
16 | - text: "The Principle of Least Resistance: In a business setting, without clear feedback on the impact of various behaviors to the bottom line, we will tend toward behaviors that are easiest in the moment."
17 | page: Location 602
18 |
19 | - text: "Busyness as Proxy for Productivity: In the absence of clear indicators of what it means to be productive and valuable in their jobs, many knowledge workers turn back toward an industrial indicator of productivity: doing lots of stuff in a visible manner."
20 | page: Location 686
21 |
22 | - text: Our brains instead construct our worldview based on what we pay attention
23 | page: Location 829
24 |
25 | - text: Human beings, it seems, are at their best when immersed deeply in something challenging.
26 | page: Location 910
27 |
28 | - text: The meaning uncovered by such efforts is due to the skill and appreciation inherent in craftsmanship—not the outcomes of their work. Put another way, a wooden wheel is not noble, but its shaping can be. You don’t need a rarified job; you need instead a rarified approach to your work.
29 | page: Location 982
30 |
31 | - text: You have a finite amount of willpower that becomes depleted as you use it. Your will, in other words, is not a manifestation of your character that you can deploy without limit; it’s instead like a muscle that tires.
32 | page: Location 1062
33 |
34 | - text: The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.
35 | page: Location 1066
36 |
37 | - text: Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets… it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.
38 | page: Location 1550
39 |
40 | - text: Trying to squeeze a little more work out of your evenings might reduce your effectiveness the next day enough that you end up getting less done than if you had instead respected a shutdown.
41 | page: Location 1619
42 |
43 | - text: Enforce at least a five-minute gap between the current moment and the next time you can go online. This gap is minor, so it won’t excessively impede your progress, but from a behavioralist perspective, it’s substantial because it separates the sensation of wanting to go online from the reward of actually doing so.
44 | page: Location 1790
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/_data/books/eat-a-peach.yaml:
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1 | - text: Lobsters grow by molting. They shed their old shell to reveal a new, soft shell that will eventually grow and harden around them. By the time they’re done, there’s no sign of the lobster they were. It’s an exhausting, dangerous process. It takes a tremendous amount of energy and leaves them exposed and vulnerable while they’re in the middle of it.
2 | page: Page 235
3 |
4 | - text: Be a fool. For love. For yourself. For what you think MIGHT possibly make you happy. Even for a little while. Whatever the cost or good sense might dictate.
5 | page: Page 257
6 | attribution: Anthony Bourdain
7 |
8 | - text: I’ve found that the cooks with the brightest prospects are the ones who are hardest on themselves. The trick is to direct that dissatisfaction to your advantage. Every day as a cook can be a fresh start. There are no lingering effects from the previous bad service. Yesterday’s mistakes are gone. Resolve to be better today. Just know that in three or four months’ time, when you move to a new section, it’s all going to feel freshly impossible again.
9 | page: Page 274
10 |
11 | - text: Every dish and service is an opportunity to collect data. It’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from it.
12 | page: Page 275
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/_data/books/eternal-life.yaml:
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1 | - text: Many days and years and people had passed before she understood that the details themselves were the still and sacred things, that there was nothing else, that the curtain of daily life itself was holy, that behind it was only a void.
2 | page: Location 50
3 |
4 | - text: "Every day of raising a child brought a rush of unwanted mourning. New parents think of each day as a cascade of beginnings: the first time she smiled, the first time she rolled over, her first steps, her first words, her first day of school. But old parents like her saw only endings: the last time she crawled, the last time she spoke in a pure raw sound unsculpted into the words of others, the last time she stood before the world in braids and laughed when she shouldn’t have, not knowing. Each child died before the person did, a small rehearsal for the future."
5 | page: Location 67
6 |
7 | - text: Within every person were so many other people; was there even room for a person’s own soul?
8 | page: Location 213
9 |
10 | - text: It still astounded her, after all these years, how much more there still was left to learn, how it never ended.
11 | page: Location 1264
12 |
13 | - text: Everything in the world was learnable—languages, professions, technologies, skills that didn’t yet exist. The only reason that curious and intelligent people didn’t master it all was a simple lack of time.
14 | page: Location 1438
15 |
16 | - text: “Fuck off, Elazar.” English was one of her favorite languages—the least poetic, the one where insults required no imagination at all.
17 | page: Location 1458
18 |
19 | - text: Grandchildren and grandparents got along so well, Rachel knew, because they had a common enemy.
20 | page: Location 1788
21 |
22 | - text: "“Actually, everything in the story is kind of like a secret message,” he said, “because God has to tell everything to people, in people’s words, but people aren’t as smart as God, so everything is like a stupid version of the real story.” Rachel had not considered this. She looked at her little boy with sudden and frightening understanding: her entire life, every person’s entire life, was a stupid version of the real story, a tiny glimpse of a tiny sliver of the briefest of moments, a few days out of eternity."
23 | page: Location 2031
24 |
25 | - text: “‘Do unto others’ is cruel, even if it sounds like kindness. It’s arrogant to think that others want exactly what you want.”
26 | page: Location 2202
27 |
28 | - text: “All of these sages are arguing about what God wants from us. But I think God actually wants us to live an impossible life. All the evidence points in that direction.”
29 | page: Location 2252
30 |
31 | - text: When she met Elazar in the tunnel that night, she gathered her anger together and presented it to him, a bouquet of pique.
32 | page: Location 3261
33 |
34 | - text: “Dying is what gives life its meaning”
35 | page: Location 3418
36 |
37 | - text: “I realized I wasn’t afraid of dying. I was afraid of no longer changing. I wanted to keep changing, keep making and seeing things change. And if you back up a bit, you see that none of that can happen without the arc of our lives, without one generation replacing another.”
38 | page: Location 3432
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/_data/books/handmaids-tale.yaml:
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1 | - text: How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability?
2 | page: Location 59
3 |
4 | - text: Waste not want not. I am not being wasted. Why do I want?
5 | page: Location 78
6 |
7 | - text: The young ones are often the most dangerous, the most fanatical, the jumpiest with their guns. They haven't yet learned about existence through time.
8 | page: Location 270
9 |
10 | - text: These women are not divided into functions. They have to do everything; if they can.
11 | page: Location 319
12 |
13 | - text: I used to think of my body as an instrument, of pleasure, or a means of transportation, or an implement for the accomplishment of my will. I could use it to run, push buttons of one sort or another, make things happen. There were limits, but my body was nevertheless lithe, single, solid, one with me. Now the flesh arranges itself differently. I'm a cloud, congealed around a central object, the shape of a pear, which is hard and more real than I am and glows red within its translucent wrapping.
14 | page: Location 910
15 |
16 | - text: I tell myself it doesn't matter, your name is like your telephone number, useful only to others; but what I tell myself is wrong, it does matter.
17 | page: Location 1023
18 |
19 | - text: But this is wrong, nobody dies from lack of sex. It's lack of love we die from.
20 | page: Location 1243
21 |
22 | - text: A man is just a woman's strategy for making other women.
23 | page: Location 1472
24 |
25 | - text: It's impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many.
26 | page: Location 1657
27 |
28 | - text: But remember that forgiveness too is a power. To beg for it is a power, and to withhold or bestow it is a power, perhaps the greatest.
29 | page: Location 1661
30 |
31 | - text: Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it.
32 | page: Location 1664
33 |
34 | - text: To want is to have a weakness.
35 | page: Location 1690
36 |
37 | - text: I feel like cotton candy, sugar and air. Squeeze me and I'd turn into a small sickly damp wad of weeping pinky-red.
38 | page: Location 1713
39 |
40 | - text: How easy it is to invent a humanity, for anyone at all. What an available temptation.
41 | page: Location 1790
42 |
43 | - text: A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as it stays inside the maze.
44 | page: Location 2022
45 |
46 | - text: That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
47 | page: Location 2142
48 |
49 | - text: You can't help what you feel, Moira once said, but you can help how you behave.
50 | page: Location 2372
51 |
52 | - text: You might even provide a Heaven for them. We need You for that. Hell we can make for ourselves.
53 | page: Location 2415
54 |
55 | - text: Who can tell what they really are? Under their daily-ness.
56 | page: Location 2806
57 |
58 | - text: Working out was also something you did to keep your body in shape, for the man. If you worked out enough, maybe the man would too.
59 | page: Location 2813
60 |
61 | - text: We were revisionists; what we revised was ourselves.
62 | page: Location 2819
63 |
64 | - text: I don't want her to be like me. Give in, go along, save her skin. That is what it comes down to. I want gallantry from her, swashbuckling, heroism, single-handed combat. Something I lack.
65 | page: Location 3151
66 |
67 | - text: I can't quite believe it. Surely her cockiness, her optimism and energy, her pizzazz, will get her out of this. She will think of something. But I know this isn't true. It is just passing the buck, as children do, to mothers.
68 | page: Location 3198
69 |
70 | - text: I remind myself that he is not an unkind man; that, under other circumstances, I even like him.
71 | page: Location 3215
72 |
73 | - text: I wish this story were different. I wish it were more civilized. I wish it showed me in a better light, if not happier, then at least more active, less hesitant, less distracted by trivia. I wish it had more shape. I wish it were about love, or about sudden realizations important to one's life, or even about sunsets, birds, rainstorms, or snow. Maybe it is about those things, in a way; but in the meantime there is so much else getting in the way, so much whispering, so much speculation about others, so much gossip that cannot be verified, so many unsaid words, so much creeping about and secrecy. And there is so much time to be endured, time heavy as fried food or thick fog; and then all at once these red events, like explosions, on streets otherwise decorous and matronly and somnambulent.
74 | page: Location 3291
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/_data/books/how-to-do-nothing.yaml:
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1 | - text: "We still recognize that much of what gives one’s life meaning stems from accidents, interruptions, and serendipitous encounters: the “off time” that a mechanistic view of experience seeks to eliminate."
2 | page: Page ix
3 |
4 | - text: "When people long for some kind of escape, it’s worth asking: What would “back to the land” mean if we understood the land to be where we are right now?"
5 | page: Page xi
6 |
7 | - text: The point of doing nothing, as I define it, isn’t to return to work refreshed and ready to be more productive, but rather to question what we currently perceive as productive.
8 | page: Page xii
9 |
10 | - text: I propose that rerouting and deepening one’s attention to place will likely lead to awareness of one's participation in history and in a more-than-human community. From either a social or ecological perspective, the ultimate goal of “doing nothing” is to wrest our focus from the attention economy and replant it in the public, physical realm.
11 | page: Page xii
12 |
13 | - text: When you collect marine animals there are certain flat worms so delicate that they are almost impossible to capture whole, for they break and tatter under the touch. You must let them ooze and crawl of their own will onto a knife blade and then lift them gently into your bottle of sea water. And perhaps that might be the way to write this book—to open the page and let the stories crawl in by themselves.
14 | page: Page 5
15 | attribution: John Steinbeck, Cannery Row
16 |
17 | - text: My mom has only ever spoken English to me, and for a very long time, I assumed that whenever my mom was speaking to another Filipino person, she was speaking Tagalog…bBut my mom was only sometimes speaking Tagalog. Other times she was speaking Ilonggo, which is a completely different language that is specific to where she's from in the Philippines. The languages are no the same, i.e. one is not simply a dialect of the other; in fact, the Philippines is full of language groups that, according to my mom, have so little in common that speakers would not be able to understand each other, and Tagalog is only one. This type of embarrassing discovery, in which something you thought was one thing is actually two things, and each of those things is actually ten things, seems like a simple fuction of the duration and quality of one's attention. With effort, we can become attuned to things, able to pick up and then hopefully differentiate finer and finer frequencies each time.
18 | page: Page 9
19 |
20 | - text: When Samuel Gompers, who led the labor group that organized this particular iteration of the eight-hour movement, gave an address titled “What Does Labor Want?” the answer he arrived at was, “It wants the earth and the fullness thereof”.
21 | page: Page 13
22 |
23 | - text: I consider “doing nothing” both as a kind of deprogramming device and as sustenance for those feeling too disassembled to act meaningfully.
24 | page: Page 22
25 |
26 | - text: If the law is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine.
27 | page: Page 75
28 | attribution: Henry David Thoreau
29 |
30 | - text: Differences in social and financial vulnerability explain why participants in mass acts of refusal have often been, and continue to be, students. James C. McMillan, an art professor at Bennett College who advised students when they participated in the 1960s Greensboro sit-ins, said that black adults were “reluctant” to “jeopardize any gains, economic or otherwise,” but that the students “did not have that kind of an investment, that kind of economic status, and, therefore, were not vulnerable to the kind of reprisals that could have occurred.”
31 | page: Page 83
32 |
33 | - text: If you hump away at menial jobs 360-plus days a year, does some kind of repetitive stress injury of the spirit set in?
34 | page: Page 86
35 | attribution: Barbara Ehrenreich
36 |
37 | - text: In her piece on the Prejudice Lab, [Jessica] Nordell speaks with Evelyn R. Carter, a social psychologist at UCLA, who tells her that “people in the majority and the minority often see two different realities” based on what they do and do not notice. For example, “white people…might only hear a racist remark, while people of color might register subtler actions, like someone scooting away slightly on the bus.”
38 | page: Page 120
39 |
40 | - text: Similar to many indigenous cultures’ relationships to land, bioregionalism is first and foremost based on observation and recognition of what grows where, as well as an appreciation for the complex web of relationships among those actors. More than observation, it also suggests a way of identifying with place, weaving oneself into a region through observation of and responsibility to the local ecosystem.
41 | page: Page 122
42 |
43 | - text: I thought about how it’s possible to move to a place without caring about who or what is already there (or what was there before), interested in the neighborhood only insofar as it allows one to maintain your existing or ideal lifestyle and social ties.
44 | page: Page 132
45 |
46 | - text: Compared to the algorithms that recommend friends to us based on instrumental qualities—things we like, things we’ve bought, friends in common—geographical proximity is different, placing us near people who we have no “obvious” instrumental reason to care about, who are neither family nor friends (nor, sometimes, even potential friends).
47 | page: Page 133
48 |
49 | - text: …when I hear a song I unexpectedly like, I sometimes feel like something I don’t know is talking to something else I don’t know, through me.
50 | page: Page 137
51 |
52 | - text: …I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed—never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege…if we don’t expand our attention outside of that sliver, we live in an “I-It” world where nothing has meaning outside of its value and relation to us. And we’re less prone to the encounters with those who turn us upside down and reorganize our universe—those who stand to change us significantly, should we allow it.
53 | page: Page 138
54 |
55 | - text: "Our idea of progress is so bound up with the idea of putting something new into the world that it can feel counterintuitive to equate progress with destruction, removal, and remediation. But this seeming contradiction actually points to a deeper contradiction: of destruction (e.g. ecosystems) frames as construction (e.g. of dams). Nineteenth-century views of progress, production, and innovation relied on an image of the land as a blank slate where its current inhabitants and systems were like so many weeds in what was destined to become an American lawn. But if were sincerely recognize all that was already here, both culturally and ecologically, we start to understand that anything framed as construction was actually also destruction."
56 | page: Page 191
57 |
58 | - text: "…a Japanese farmer named Masanobu Fukuoka experienced this Copernican shift when he invented what he called “do-nothing farming”. Inspired by the productivity of an abandoned lot that he saw filled with grasses and weeds, Fukuoka figured out a method of farming that made use of existing relationships in the land. Instead of flooding fields and sowing rice in the spring, he scattered the seeds directly on the ground in the fall, as they would have fallen naturally. In place of conventional fertilizer, he grew a cover of green clover, and threw the leftover stalks back on top when he was done. Fukuoka’s method required less labor, no machines, and no chemicals, but it took him decades to perfect and required extremely close attention. If everything was done at precisely the right time, the reward was unmistakable: not only was Fukuoka’s farm more productive and sustainable than neighboring farms, his method was able to remediate poor soils after a few seasons, creating farmable land on rocky outcrops and other inhospitable areas."
59 | page: Page 193
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/_data/books/in-the-dream-house.yaml:
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1 | - text: "If your chin turns yellow, it means you’re in love…The trick, or maybe it’s the punch line, is that the yellow always comes off on your skin. The dandelion yields every time. It has no wiles, no secrets, no sense of self-preservation. And so it goes that, even as children, we understand something we cannot articulate: The diagnosis never changes. We will always be hungry, will always want. Our bodies and minds will always crave something, even if we don’t recognize it."
2 | page: Location 137
3 | - text: If you could harness that energy—that constant, roving hunger—you could do wonders with it. You could push the earth inch by inch through the cosmos until it collided heart-first with the sun.
4 | page: Location 147
5 | - text: Your female crushes were always floating past you, out of reach, but she touches your arm and looks directly at you and you feel like a child buying something with her own money for the first time.
6 | page: Location 167
7 | - text: Your heart launches itself against your rib cage like an animal.
8 | page: Location 229
9 | - text: We deserve to have our wrongdoing represented as much as our heroism, because when we refuse wrongdoing as a possibility for a group of people, we refuse their humanity. That is to say, queers—real-life ones—do not deserve representation, protection, and rights because they are morally pure or upright as a people. They deserve those things because they are human beings, and that is enough.
10 | page: Location 586
11 | - text: "And it sounds terrible but it is, in fact, freeing: the idea that queer does not equal good or pure or right. It is simply a state of being—one subject to politics, to its own social forces, to larger narratives, to moral complexities of every kind. So bring on the queer villains, the queer heroes, the queer sidekicks and secondary characters and protagonists and extras. They can be a complete cast unto themselves. Let them have agency, and then let them go."
12 | page: Location 598
13 | - text: "You wonder if, at any point in history, some creature scuttled over what would, eons later, be the living room, and cocked its head to the side to listen to the faintest of sounds: yelling, weeping. Ghosts of a future that hadn’t happened yet."
14 | page: Location 807
15 | - text: “Safe as houses” is something closer to “the house always wins.” Instead of a shared structure providing shelter, it means that the person in charge is secure; everyone else should be afraid.
16 | page: Location 905
17 | - text: A reminder, perhaps, that abusers do not need to be, and rarely are, cackling maniacs. They just need to want something, and not care how they get it.
18 | page: Location 1123
19 | - text: "She is always trying to win. You want to say to her: We cannot advance together if you are like this. Love cannot be won or lost; a relationship doesn’t have a scoring system. We are partners, paired against the world. We cannot succeed if we are at odds with each other."
20 | page: Location 1283
21 | - text: Most types of domestic abuse are completely legal.
22 | page: Location 1287
23 | - text: But the nature of archival silence is that certain people’s narratives and their nuances are swallowed by history; we see only what pokes through because it is sufficiently salacious for the majority to pay attention.
24 | page: Location 1602
25 | - text: The trouble with letting people see you at your worst isn’t that they’ll remember; it’s that you’ll remember.
26 | page: Location 2027
27 | attribution: Sarah Manguso
28 | - text: The fact is, people settle near volcanoes because the resulting soil is extraordinary, dense with nutrients from the ash. In this dangerous place their fruit is sweeter, their crops taller, their flowers more radiant, their yield more bountiful. The truth is, there is no better place to live than in the shadow of a beautiful, furious mountain.
29 | page: Location 2070
30 | - text: You celebrated him despite his position on gays marrying because he was the best thing possible at that moment; imperfect in a way that affected you but was generally good for the world. You did not believe this was a battle that would be won in your lifetime, and so you resolved yourself to live in that wobbly space where your humanity and rights were openly debated on cable news, and the defense of them was not a requirement for the presidency. You were already a woman, so you knew. Occupying that space was your goddamned specialty.
31 | page: Location 2297
32 | - text: “Uncle Nick,” you say, “I am a lesbian, and my girlfriend just broke up with me.” Then the wrecking ball goes clear through the dam, and you begin to bawl. “Ohhhhh,” he says. “Ohhhhh.” You are wrapped in his arms; he is hugging you so tight. “Your heart is broken. I understand. Everyone’s heart breaks in the same way.”
33 | page: Location 2328
34 | - text: These stories are so common that they are no longer shocking in any meaningful sense; it is more surprising when there is no evidence of a talented man having hurt someone at all.
35 | page: Location 2517
36 | - text: "I imagine that, one day, I will invite young queers over for tea and cheese platters and advice, and I will be able to tell them: you can be hurt by people who look just like you. Not only can it happen, it probably will, because the world is full of hurt people who hurt people."
37 | page: Location 2583
38 | - text: "Nonstalgia (noun) The unsettling sensation that you are never be able to fully access the past; that once you are departed from an event, some essential quality of it is lost forever. A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to."
39 | page: Location 2626
40 | - text: "When I was a kid, I learned that you develop immunity when an illness rages through your body. Your body is brilliant, even when you are not. It doesn’t just heal—it learns. It remembers. (All of this, of course, if the virus doesn’t kill you first.) After the Dream House, I developed a sixth sense. It goes off at random times—meeting a new classmate or coworker, a friend’s new girlfriend, a stranger at a party. A physical revulsion that comes on the heels of nothing at all, something akin to the sour liquid rush of saliva that precedes vomiting. Inconvenient, irritating, but important: my brilliant body’s brilliant warning."
41 | page: Location 2660
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/_data/books/interview-with-the-vampire.yaml:
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1 | - text: People who cease to believe in God or goodness altogether still believe in the devil. I don’t know why. No, I do indeed know why. Evil is always possible. And goodness is eternally difficult.
2 | page: Location 195
3 |
4 | - text: I should like to pass through all manner of different keyholes and feel the tickle of their peculiar shapes.
5 | page: Location 370
6 |
7 | - text: I thought of what lay before me throughout the world and throughout time, and resolved to go about it delicately and reverently, learning that from each thing which would take me best to another.
8 | page: Location 510
9 |
10 | - text: I suppose that is the nature of the monument. Be it a small house or a mansion of Corinthian columns and wrought-iron lace. The monument does not say that this or that man walked here. No, that what he felt in one time in one spot continues. The moon that rose over New Orleans then still rises. As long as the monuments stand, it still rises. The feeling, at least here … and there … it remains the same.
11 | page: Location 652
12 |
13 | - text: Like all strong people, she suffered always a measure of loneliness; she was a marginal outsider, a secret infidel of a certain sort.
14 | page: Location 1055
15 |
16 | - text: The sky had come down to meet the sea and that some great secret was to be revealed in that meeting, some great gulf miraculously closed forever.
17 | page: Location 2629
18 |
19 | - text: I had one of those rare moments when it seemed I thought of nothing. My mind had no shape. I saw that the rain had stopped. I saw that the air was clear and cold. That the street was luminous.
20 | page: Location 5124
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/_data/books/life-after-life.yaml:
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1 | - text: We must remember these people when we are safely in the future.
2 | page: Location 1168
3 |
4 | - text: Butter was plastered onto the roll with no regard for the hard labor of the cow.
5 | page: Location 1309
6 |
7 | - text: They also serve who only stand and wait.
8 | page: Location 4034
9 |
10 | - text: It was quite wearyingly relentless but the only way that one could go was forward.
11 | page: Location 5061
12 |
13 | - text: She opened her arms to the black bat and they flew to each other, embracing in the air like long-lost souls.
14 | page: Location 5942
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/_data/books/luster.yaml:
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1 | - text: I think to myself, You are a desirable woman. You are not a dozen gerbils in a skin casing.
2 | page: Page 5
3 |
4 | - text: “You’re kind of aloof,” he says, and all the kids stacked underneath my trench coat rejoice.
5 | page: Page 12
6 |
7 | - text: I am good, but not good enough, which is worse than simply being bad. IT is almost. The difference between being there when it happens and stepping out just in time to see it on the news. Still, I can’t help feeling that in the closest arm of the multiverse, there is a version of me that is fatter and happier, smiling in my own studio, paint behind my ears.
8 | page: Page 26
9 |
10 | - text: “I never said no to you. Not to anything. That documentary about Norwegian puppetry was three hours long.”
11 | page: Page 77
12 |
13 | - text: I throw in some blatant lies and make sure any inconsistencies are small enough to explain away once I have a foot in the door and am armed with enough recon on my interviewer to either have talking points on the company culture or a five-point plan to suck dry any available reservoirs of white guilt. I interview well despite my nerves, and while I wish I could take credit for that, my ability to maintain human form and make a good impression is all about my skin. The expectations of me in these settings are frequently so low, it would be impossible not to surpass them.
14 | page: Page 83
15 |
16 | - text: …the bike lanes in Manhattan already terrifying at 11:00 a.m., filled with delivery boys and girls who jet into traffic with fried rice and no reason to live, along with the sentient abdominals who do this for fun…
17 | page: Page 89
18 |
19 | - text: The Sabbath itself was pristine. Of course I indulged loopholes. Sometimes I slept it away so I could avoid the boredom, sometimes I spent the day curating twelve-hour mixtapes of Christian rock. But most of the time, though I wasn’t allowed to dance and knew that everyone was having fun without me, I liked the quiet, the languor of a single hour, of a day when you are deliberate, thankful for what was made deliberately, retina and turnips and densely coiled stars, things so complex I could barely render them in paint.
20 | page: Page 152
21 |
22 | - text: It’s a death rattle, she says, directing me to the lawn mower and adjusting the string on the mask, the grass communicating its distress, and for the rest of the day I think of that, sick to my stomach, the lawn buzzed and alkaline, the vinegar in the wine and the carnage in the dew, everywhere the perfume of things that want to live.
23 | page: Page 173
24 |
25 | - text: The acceptable interval for which I can be embarrassed for what I said to the doctors has passed, but I still think about it for weeks, what I meant when I said I was an artist. I think about the painting in the clinic and the canvas fibers curled beneath the oil. All the raw materials that are gathered and processed into shadow and light. The pigments drawn from sand and Canterbury bells, the carbon black drawn from fire and spread onto slick cave walls. A way is always made to document how we manage to survive, or in some cases, how we don’t. So I’ve tried to reproduce an inscrutable thing. I’ve made my own hunger into a practice, made everyone who passes through my life subject to a close and inappropriate reading that occasionally finds its way, often insufficiently, into paint. And when I am alone with myself, this is what I am waiting for someone to do to me, with merciless, deliberate hands, to put me down onto the canvas so that when I’m gone, there will be a record, proof that I was here.
26 | page: Page 226
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/_data/books/miracle-of-mindfulness.yaml:
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1 | - text: Then Allen said, “I’ve discovered a way to have a lot more time. In the past, I used to look at my time as if it were divided into several parts. One part I reserved for Joey, another part was for Sue, another part to help with Ana, another part for household work. The left over I considered my own. I could read, write, do research, go for walks. But now I try not to divide time into parts anymore. I consider my time with Joey and Sue as my own time. When I help Joey with his homework, I try to find ways of seeing his time as my own time. I go through his lesson with him, sharing his presence and finding ways to be interested what we do during that time. The time for him becomes my own time. The same with Sue. The remarkable thing is that now I have unlimited time for myself!”
2 | page: Page 2
3 |
4 | - text: …I suggest to those who come to the meditation sessions that each person should try hard to reserve one day out of the week to devote entirely to their practice of mindfulness.
5 | page: Page 27
6 |
7 | - text: The feeling that any task is a nuisance will soon disappear if it is done in mindfulness. Take the Zen Masters. No matter what task or motion they undertake, they do it slowly and evenly, without reluctance.
8 | page: Page 29
9 |
10 | - text: "At lunchtime, prepare a meal for yourself. Cook the meal and wash the dishes in mindfulness. In the morning, after you have cleaned and straightened up your house, and in the afternoon, after you have worked in the garden or watched clouds or gathered flowers, prepare a pot of tea to sit and drink in mindfulness. Allow yourself a good length of time to do this…drink your tea slowly and reverantly, as if it is the axis on which the whole earth revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life. Don’t be attached to the future. Don’t worry about things you have to do. Don’t think about getting up or taking off to do something. Don’t think about “departing”."
11 | page: Page 29
12 |
13 | - text: If you cannot find joy in peace in these very moments of sitting, then the future itself will only flow by as a river flows by, you will not be able to hold it back, you will be incapable of living the future when it has become the present. Joy and peace are the joy and peace possible in this very hour of sitting. If you cannot find it here, you won’t find it anywhere. Don’t chase after your thoughts as a shadow following its object. Don’t run after your thoughts. Find joy and peace in this very moment.
14 | page: Page 36
15 |
16 | - text: "Find a photo of yourself as a child. Sit in the full or half lotus. Begin to follow your breath. After 20 breaths, begin to focus your attention on the photo in front of you. Recreate and live again the five aggregates of which you were made up at the time the photo was taken: the physical characteristics of your body, your feelings, perceptions, mind functionings, and consciousness at that age. Continue to follow your breath. Do not let your memories lure you away or overcome you. Maintain this meditation for 15 minutes. Maintain the half smile. Turn your mindfulness to your present self. Be conscious of your body, feelings, perceptions, mind functionings, and consciousness in the present moment. See the five aggregates which make up yourself. Ask the question, “who am I?” The question should be deeply rooted in you, like a new seed nestled deep in the soft earth and damp with water. The question “who am I?” should not be an abstract question to consider with your discursive intellect. The question “who am I?” will not be confined to your intellect, but to the care of the whole of the five aggregates. Don’t try to seek an intellectual answer. Contemplate for 10 minutes, maintaining light but deep breath to prevent being pulled away be philosophical reflection."
17 | page: Page 88
18 |
19 | - text: "Sit in a dark room by yourself, or alone by a river at night, or anywhere else where there is solitude. Begin to take hold of your breath. Give rise to the thought, “I will use my finger to point at myself,” and then instead of pointing at your body, point away in the opposite direction. Contemplate seeing yourself outside of your bodily form. Contemplate seeing your bodily form present before you—in the trees, the grass and leaves, the river. Be mindful that you are in the universe and the universe is in you: if the universe is, you are; if you are, the universe is. There is no birth. There is no death. There is no coming. There is no going."
20 | page: Page 89
21 |
22 | - text: Contemplate the image of the person who has caused you the most suffering. Regard the features you hate or despise the most and find the most repulsive. Try to examine what makes this person happy and what causes suffering in his daily life. Contemplate the person’s perceptions; try to see what patterns of thought and reason this person follows. Examine what motivates this person’s hopes and actions. Finally consider the person’s consciousness. See whether his views and insights are open and free or not, and whether or not he has been influenced by any prejudices, narrow-mindedness, hatred, or anger. See whether or not he is master of himself. Continue until you feel compassion rise in your heart like a well filling with fresh water and your anger and resentment disappear. Practice this exercise many times on the same person.
23 | page: Page 93
24 |
25 | - text: "…take the situation of a country suffering war or any other situation of injustice. Try to see that every person involved in the conflict is a victim. See that no person, including all those in warring parties or in what appear to be opposing sides, desires the suffering to continue. See that it is not only one or a few persons who are to blame for the situation. See that the situation is possible because of the clinging to ideologies and to an unjust world economic system which is upheld by every person through ignorance or through lack of resolve to change it. See that two sides in a conflict are not really opposing, but two aspects of the same reality. See that the most essential thing is life and that killing or oppressing one another will not solve anything. Remember the Sutra’s words: “In the time of war / Raise in yourself the Mind of Compassion / Help living beings / Abandon the wil l to fight / Wherever there is furious battle / Use all your might / To keep both sides’ strength equal / And then step into the conflict to reconcile” —Vimalakirti Nirdesa. Meditate until every reproach and hatred disappears, and compassion and love rise like a well of fresh water within you. Vow to work for awareness and reconciliation by the most silent and unpretentious means possible."
26 | page: Page 95
27 |
28 | - text: "Detachment: sit in the full or half lotus. Follow your breath. Recall the most significant achievements in your life and examine each of them. Examine your talent, your virtue, your capacity, the convergence of favorable conditions that have led to success. Examine the complacency and arrogance that have arisen from the feeling that you are the main cause for such success. Shed the light of interdependence on the whole matter to see that the achievement is not really yours but the convergence of various conditions beyond your reach. See to it that you will not be bound to these achievements. Only when you can relinquish them can you really be free and no longer assailed by them. Recall the bitterest failures in your life and examine each of them. Examine your talent, your virtue, your capacity, and the absence of favorable conditions that led to the failures. Examine to see all the complexes that have arisen within you from the feeling that you are not capable of realizing success. Shed the light of interdependence on the whole matter to see that failures cannot be accounted for by your inabilities but rather by the lack of favorable conditions. See that you have no strength to shoulder these failures, that these failures are not your own self. See to it that you are free from them. Only when you can relinquish them can you really be free and no longer assailed by them."
29 | page: Page 97
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/_data/books/seeking-the-sacred.yaml:
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1 | - text: What we regard as precious, we will naturally protect.
2 | page: Page 3
3 |
4 | - text: "Concern, connectedness, dignity, forgiveness, patience, tolerance, gratitude, and an inclusive intelligence: this is what the world needs. This is what we need."
5 | page: Page
6 |
7 | - text: Whatever our culture, religion, or language, we want food, shelter, and good health. We want to be able to get up in t he morning enthusiastically and sleep safely at night. We want health, safety, and happiness for our loved ones. We want to know that our lives are purposeful and sometimes gracious. We want to feel part of something greater than ourselves. We want and neeed inspiration and meaning.
8 | page: Page 6
9 |
10 | - text: Acknowledging your gift of life as sacred doesn’t mean I have to like you, agree with you, or support your views. It doesn’t mean that I have to lie down like a doormat for your feet. It doesn’t mean that I should stand by passively or indifferently if you are harming yourself or others. It doesn’t mean that I can afford to harm or diminish myself. What it does mean is that I have no right to denigrate, hurt, or kill you because you see the world and its problems differently from how I do. I have no right to crush your spirit to make myself feel bigger or more important. I have no right, either, to ignore or compound your suffering because it is taking place in a country far from my home, because your religion is not mine or because I loath and despise your political or cultural ideology. Nor dor I have the right to scorn or trample on my own precious, unique gift of life because it isn’t measuring up to the plan I had for it.
11 | page: Page 7
12 |
13 | - text: Tell people how innately worthless they are and their feelings of spiritual entitlement will be impoverished.
14 | page: Page 16
15 |
16 | - text: “Believing” in love as a value, and perhaps also in a God of love, while living unlovingly, is progressively less convincing.
17 | page: Page 40
18 |
19 | - text: Our inner changes are not always “convenient” to outer timetables. We can’t and we do not always move right along at a pace that others would like and we might also desire.
20 | page: Page 65
21 |
22 | - text: We are drowning in an ocean of self.
23 | page: Page 68
24 |
25 | - text: It takes tremendous courage to consider that whatever is unwelcome in our lives is not happening to us but possibly FOR us.
26 | page: Page 73
27 |
28 | - text: …to see our lives as sacred is literally life-saving.
29 | page: Page 76
30 |
31 | - text: "Great doubt: great awakening. / Little doubt: little awakening. / No doubt: no awakening."
32 | attribution: Zen teaching
33 | page: Page 103
34 |
35 | - text: How we think about ourselves will emerge loud and clear through the way we think about and treat other people.
36 | page: Page 111
37 |
38 | - text: We need to know that it always harms our own sense of self when we reduce “the other” to little more than an object of our contempt. Such behavior demonstrates a brutal ignorance of the subtle and even the gross complexities of each individual’s unfolding situation, and of spiritual claims that in our vast and uncomfortable diversity we are a single family.
39 | page: Page 117
40 |
41 | - text: Conditional love lets me love my life (and myself) when I am giving or doing “enough”. Unconditional love lets me love and value my life. Period.
42 | page: Page 127
43 |
44 | - text: Your inner critic and mine…knows little or nothing about sufficiency. On the contrary, [they] may mistake “sufficiency” for bigheadedness, for being “spoiled”, smug, or self-satisfied. Inner critics might vary their messages between criticisms, warnings, whining, bullying, or belittling, but are unlikely ever to be spacious, kind, light, or forgiving, or to remind us of the preciousness of this fleeting life, the preciousness of our own lives, and the capacities we have to meet even the most difficult moments with courage and hope.
45 | page: Page 127
46 |
47 | - text: Yvonne’s inner story paralyzes even her capacity to imagine effective change and, like any one of us, Yvonne will never achieve what she cannot first imagine.
48 | page: Page 130
49 |
50 | - text: Identity is always a mix of the conditioned and the chosen.
51 | page: Page 139
52 |
53 | - text: It took me so many years to discover that the value of my life does not rest on my work. My life—like yours—is intrinsically precious. Has intrinsic meaning. Is already a gift and always has been.
54 | page: Page 165
55 |
56 | - text: We receive love more confidently when we feel able to give it.
57 | page: Page 171
58 |
59 | - text: I am part of something wondrous. My life has value.
60 | page: Page 173
61 |
62 | - text: What seekers do need and often year for is…“a direct and unmediated contact with the Divine, free of the divisiveness, body hatred, and bias towards transcendence that disfigures all the inherited patriarchal religions.”
63 | attribution: Andrew Harvey, “The Direct Path”
64 | page: Page 175
65 |
66 | - text: Yet a sense that our inner world is a place of love and a resource for all the highest qualities can be extremely difficult to grasp with the intellect alone. Surrender some of our usual ways of thinking is needed to make way for these kinds of experiences.
67 | page: Page 177
68 |
69 | - text: “We are not spiritual beings having spiritual experiences. We are spiritual beings living a human life.”
70 | attribution: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
71 | page: Page 182
72 |
73 | - text: What a delight to find that you are not the center of an anxious universe, with other people waiting to judge and condemn you, but that instead you are part of an intricately connected, sacred universe, filled with people whom you can positively influence, support, and encourage—and who will sometimes similiarly support you.
74 | page: Page 207
75 |
76 | - text: Wisdom teaches me I am nothing. Love teaches me I am everything. Between these two poles my life flows.
77 | attribution: Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
78 | page: Page 215
79 |
80 | - text: I don’t feel a need to know the details of the afterlife experience. I have a profound trust that my spirit knows where it came from and therefore knows where it’s going.
81 | page: Page 220
82 |
83 | - text: Worldwide spending on war and war readiness is greater than the sum needed for every human being on earth to have food, clean water and shelter, and the chance to live in their homeland.
84 | page: Page 256
85 |
86 | - text: When you know beyond all doubting that the same life flows through all that is and you are that life, you will love all naturally and spotaneously. When you realize the depth and fulness of your love of yourself, you know that every living being and the entire universe are included in your affection.
87 | attribution: Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
88 | page: Page 283
89 |
90 | - text: “One of the conditions of enlightenment has always been a willingness to let go of what we thought we knew in order to appreciate truths we had never dreamed of.”
91 | attribution: Karen Armstrong
92 | page: Page 296
93 |
94 | - text: “Believe nothing because someone wise has said it. / Believe nothing because it is generally held. / Believe nothing because it is written down. / Believe nothing because it is said to be Godly. Believe nothing because someone else believes it. / Believe only what you yourself discover to be true.”
95 | attribution: the Buddha
96 | page: Page 321
97 |
98 | - text: The journey inward is risky. People know that instinctively. Maps that take us in that direction are handmade and patchy. What they may do for me today may not help me tomorrow. Staying awake demands mindfulness writ large.
99 | page: Page 322
100 |
101 | - text: “Horizons are smashed [and] people of different beliefs and cultures are colliding with each other. That transformation is really of the whole sense of humanity and what it means to be a cultured and world-related human being. Anything from the past–such as an idea of what [humankind] of this, that, or another culture might be, or should be—is now archaic. And so we have to leave our little provincial stories behind. They may guide us as far as structuring our lives for the moment, but we must always be ready to drop them and to grab the new experience as it comes along, and to interpret it.
102 | attribution: Joseph Campbell, “The Open Life”
103 | page: Page 323
104 |
105 | - text: "“We live at a pace where it is normal to jump when someone snaps their fingers. And to feel guilty and ashamed if we can’t. It’s so normal to ‘serve’ a whole fleet of ‘masters’ that we hardly know we are doing it: the masters of the media, of commercialization, of semmingly trivial things like what we should wear or eat or how slim or fit we should be, as well as the more obvious ‘masters’ of work and its demands.”"
106 | attribution: Jane Moore
107 | page: Page 327
108 |
109 | - text: We need time for reverie and daydreaming, a necessary precursor to any kind of original thinking or creativity, and so often ignored as we sit in front of electronic screens both for work and rest.
110 | page: Page 333
111 |
112 | - text: How we understand or accept the inevitability of death will starkly affect how we regard life, and move through it.
113 | page: Page 349
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/_data/books/shrill.yaml:
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1 | - text: What if we got into a scrape? They couldn’t boost me up a cliff or lower me down an embankment or squeeze me through a tight fissure or hoist me from the hot jaws of a bear.
2 | page: Location 159
3 |
4 | - text: They tell you that if you hate yourself hard enough, you can grab just a tail feather or two of perfection.
5 | page: Location 166
6 |
7 | - text: Denying people access to value is an incredibly insidious form of emotional violence, one that our culture wields aggressively and liberally to keep marginalized groups small and quiet.
8 | page: Location 731
9 |
10 | - text: "Studies have shown that visual exposure to certain body types actually changes people’s perception of those bodies—in other words, looking at pictures of fat people makes you like fat people more. (Eternal reminder: Representation matters.)"
11 | page: Location 747
12 |
13 | - text: The tide of public opinion has always turned, invariably, on coolness. People just want to be cool.
14 | page: Location 2001
15 |
16 | - text: "All of those changes are small, but they tell us something big: Our world isn’t fixed, the way those currently in charge would have you believe. It’s malleable."
17 | page: Location 2526
18 |
19 | - text: Voting is world-building. So is kindness, compassion, listening, making space, saying yes, saying no. We’re all building our world, right now, in real time. Let’s build it better.
20 | page: Location 2544
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/_data/books/tech.yaml:
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1 | - text: Google got concerned about nefarious search engine optimization tricks, and kept changing their algorithm, meaning that pretty soon the only web publishers that could thrive were those who could afford to keep tweaking their technology to keep up in this new arms race. After just a few years, this became a rich-get-richer economy, and incentivized every smaller publisher to standardize on one of a few publishing tools in order to keep up with Google’s demands.
2 | source: https://medium.com/humane-tech/tech-and-the-fake-market-tactic-8bd386e3d382#.bn37a3ki9
3 | title: Tech and the Fake Market tactic
4 | author: Anil Dash
5 | - text: These new False Markets only resemble true markets just enough to pull the wool over the eyes of regulators and media, whose enthusiasm for high tech solutions is boundless, and whose understanding of markets on the Internet is still stuck in the early eBay era of 20 years ago.
6 | source: https://medium.com/humane-tech/tech-and-the-fake-market-tactic-8bd386e3d382#.bn37a3ki9
7 | title: Tech and the Fake Market tactic
8 | author: Anil Dash
9 | - text: The only social force empowered to anticipate or prevent these disruptions are policymakers who are often too illiterate to understand how these technologies work, and who too desperately want the halo of appearing to be associated with “high tech”, the secular religion of America.
10 | source: https://medium.com/humane-tech/tech-and-the-fake-market-tactic-8bd386e3d382#.bn37a3ki9
11 | title: Tech and the Fake Market tactic
12 | author: Anil Dash
13 | - text: "And perhaps the single biggest thing we can do is both the hardest and the easiest: We can change our own behaviors. Look at the apps on your phone right now. Are you sure you are comfortable with what’s going to happen when everyone’s running the same apps that you are?"
14 | source: https://medium.com/humane-tech/tech-and-the-fake-market-tactic-8bd386e3d382#.bn37a3ki9
15 | title: Tech and the Fake Market tactic
16 | author: Anil Dash
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/_data/books/the-color-purple.yaml:
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1 | - text: It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That’s how come I know trees fear man.
2 | page: Location 325
3 |
4 | - text: She skinny as a bean, and her face full of eyes.
5 | page: Location 641
6 |
7 | - text: There’s no beginning or end to teaching and learning and working—it all runs together.
8 | page: Location 1366
9 |
10 | - text: We know a roofleaf is not Jesus Christ, but in its own humble way, is it not God?
11 | page: Location 1576
12 |
13 | - text: She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They come to church to share God, not find God.
14 | page: Location 1977
15 |
16 | - text: God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for. Trouble do it for most folks, I think. Sorrow, lord. Feeling like shit.
17 | page: Location 1999
18 |
19 | - text: "My first step from the old white man was trees. Then air. Then birds. Then other people. But one day when I was sitting quiet and feeling like a motherless child, which I was, it come to me: that feeling of being part of everything, not separate at all. I knew that if I cut a tree, my arm would bleed. And I laughed and I cried and I run all around the house."
20 | page: Location 2006
21 |
22 | - text: God love all them feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves ’em you enjoys ’em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking what you like...more than anything else, God love admiration.
23 | page: Location 2011
24 |
25 | - text: People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.
26 | page: Location 2017
27 |
28 | - text: I just feel funny living in a square. If I was square, then I could take it better, she say.
29 | page: Location 2160
30 |
31 | - text: She got a right to look over the world in whatever company she choose. Just cause I love her don’t take away none of her rights.
32 | page: Location 2834
33 |
34 | - text: Here us is, I thought, two old fools left over from love, keeping each other company under the stars.
35 | page: Location 2870
36 |
37 | - text: The only way to stop making somebody the serpent is for everybody to accept everybody else as a child of God, or one mother’s children, no matter what they look like or how they act.
38 | page: Location 2921
39 |
40 | - text: It didn’t take long to realize I didn’t hardly know nothing.
41 | page: Location 3000
42 |
43 | - text: I think us here to wonder, myself. To wonder. To ask. And that in wondering bout the big things and asking bout the big things, you learn about the little ones, almost by accident. But you never know nothing more about the big things than you start out with. The more I wonder, he say, the more I love.
44 | page: Location 3003
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/_data/books/the-mothers.yaml:
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1 | - text: Her days felt like being handed from person to person like a baton, her calculus teacher passing her to her Spanish teacher to her chemistry teacher to her friends and back home to her parents. Then one day, her mother’s hand was gone and she’d fallen, clattering to the floor.
2 | page: Page 4
3 |
4 | - text: Bones, like anything, strong until they weren’t.
5 | page: Page 11
6 |
7 | - text: Oh girl, we have known little bit love…we have run tongues over teeth to savor that last littlebit as long as we could, and in all our living, nothing has starved us more.
8 | page: Page 22
9 |
10 | - text: We don’t think of ourselves as “prayer warriors.” A man must’ve come up with that term—men think anything difficult is war.
11 | page: Page 38
12 |
13 | - text: Maybe she’d never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn’t know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?
14 | page: Page 67
15 |
16 | - text: That’s what happens when you get old. Every part of you drops, as if the body is moving closer to where it’s from and where it’ll return.
17 | page: Page 87
18 |
19 | - text: It’s exciting, loving someone who can never love you back. Freeing, in its own way.
20 | page: Page 88
21 |
22 | - text: She got her mother in her, holding the knife, and her own spirit flinted over, and each time they struck, she would spark. Her whole life, a spark.
23 | page: Page 274
24 |
25 | - text: We see the span of her life unspooling in colorful threads and we chase it, wrapping it around our hands as more tumbles out. She’s her mother’s age now. Double her age. Our age. You’re our mother. We’re climbing inside of you.
26 | page: Page 275
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/_data/books/the-night-watchman.yaml:
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1 | - text: She slowed to pick her way through places where water was seeping up through the mats of dying grass. Rain tapping through the brilliant leaves the only sound. She stopped. The sense of something there, with her, all around her, swirling and seething with energy. How intimately the trees seized the earth. How exquisitely she was included. Patrice closed her eyes and felt a tug. Her spirit poured into the air like song. Wait! She opened her eyes and threw her weight into her cold feet. This must be how Gerald felt when he flew across the earth. Sometimes she frightened herself.
2 | page: Page 51
3 | - text: “Go to the not-police. Sorry to put it this way. She might have got into trouble. So, what I'm saying is, go to the scum.?” “Oh, well, okay, but I don't know. How do I find the scum?” “Rises to the top. Just look around. Find the questionable people who are in charge of things.”
4 | page: Page 89
5 | - text: “Let’s put the seal on the promise,” she whispered, and held his face between her hands. He put his hands on her hands and it was like they were both holding him together. Then he dropped his hands and went to her.
6 | page: Page 143
7 | - text: They both started laughing in that desperate high-pitched way people laugh when their hearts are broken.
8 | page: Page 191
9 | - text: You cannot feel time grind against you. Time is nothing but everything, not the seconds, minutes, hours, days, years. Yet this substanceless substance, this bending and shaping, this warp-ing, this is the way we understand our world. Zhaanat was lying on her daughter's bed, in a slat of cool fall sunshine, the exhausted baby in her arms. They were drifting in frictionless eternal motion when Patrice entered, slipped out of her shoes. She took her hat off, lay down beside them, and opened her blue coat like a wing.
10 | page: Page 193
11 | - text: Sometimes he found small ocean shells while working in the fields. Some were whorled; others were tiny grooved scallops. He drilled holes in them and hung them from the lengths of sinew. “Barnes was saying there used to be an ocean here,” he said to Thomas. “From the endless way-back times.” “Think of it. Vera's baby will be playing with these little things from the bottom of the sea that was here. Who could have known?” “We are connected to the way-back people, here, in so many ways. Maybe a way-back person touched these shells. Maybe the little creatures in them disintegrated into the dirt. Maybe some tiny piece from that creature is inside us now. We can't know these things.”
12 | page: Page 322
13 | - text: Things started going wrong, as far as Zhaanat was concerned, when places everywhere were named for people—political figures, priests, explorers and not for the real things that happened in these places—the dreaming, the eating, the death, the appearance of animals. This confusion of the chimookomaanag between the timelessness of the earth and the short span here of mortals was typical of their arrogance. But it seemed to Zhaanat that this behavior had caused a rift in the life of places. The animals didn't come around to these locations stained by the names of humans. Plants, also, had begun to grow fitfully. The most delicate of her plant medicines were even dying out altogether, or perhaps they had torn themselves up by the roots to drag their fruits and leaves to secret spots where even Zhaanat couldn't find them. And now even these half ruined places that bore the names of saints and homestead people and priests, these places were going to be taken. In her experience, once these people talked of taking land it was as good as gone.
14 | page: Page 344
15 | - text: He’d be in danger, she thought. I do things perfectly when enraged.
16 | page: Page 409
17 | - text: Together they drank the icy birch water, which entered them the way life entered the trees, causing buds to swell along the branches. Patrice leaned to one side and put her ear to the trunk of a birch tree. She could hear the humming rush of the tree drinking from the earth. She closed her eyes, went through the bark like water, and was sucked up off the bud tips into a cloud. She looked down at herself and her mother, sitting by a small fire in the spring woods. Zhaanat tipped her head back and smiled. She gestured at her daughter to come back, the way she had when as a child Patrice strayed. “Ambe bi-izhaan omaa akiing minawa,” she said, and Patrice returned.
18 | page: Page 439
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/_data/books/the-power.yaml:
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1 | - text: However complicated you think it is, everything is more complicated than that. There are no shortcuts. Not to understanding and not to knowledge. You can’t put anyone into a box. Listen, even a stone isn’t the same as any other stone, so I don’t know where you all think you get off labeling humans with simple words and thinking you know everything you need.
2 | page: Page 360
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/_data/books/the-sentence.yaml:
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1 | - text: Sometimes I’d see a tiny restaurant I liked the look of so I’d get off at the next stop and go inside, order soup. I took a tour of world soups. Avgolemono. Sambar. Menudo. Egusi with fufu. Ajiaco. Borscht. Leberknödel suppe. Gazpacho. Tom yam. Solyanka. Nässelsoppa. Gumbo. Gamjaguk. Miso. Pho ga. Samgyetang. I kept a list in my diary, with the price of the soup next to each name. All were satisfyingly cheap and very filling.
2 | page: Location 843
3 |
4 | - text: Also, as I was finding, this dimming season sharpens one. The trees are bare. Spirits stir in the stripped branches. November supposedly renders thin the veil.
5 | page: Location 966
6 |
7 | - text: Actually, Penstemon is desperately romantic, deeply tied to her traditions, and I worry for her paper heart.
8 | page: Location 988
9 |
10 | - text: Alongside my bed there is always a Lazy Stack and a Hard Stack. I put Flora’s book onto the Hard Stack, which included Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande, two works by Svetlana Alexievich, and other books on species loss, viruses, antibiotic resistance, and how to prepare dried food. These were books I would avoid reading until some wellspring of mental energy was uncapped. Still, I usually managed to read the books in my Hard Stack, eventually.
11 | page: Location 1439
12 |
13 | - text: "Once in a while I encounter that oblivion in the form of an unreal me. This unreal me is paralyzed by one bottomless thought: I didn’t choose this format. I didn’t choose to be organized into a Tookie. What, or who, made that happen? Why? What will happen if I do not accept this outrage? It isn’t easy to stay organized in this shape. I can feel what it would be like to stop making that effort. Without constant work the format called me would decay."
14 | page: Location 1512
15 |
16 | - text: All over the world—in Greek villages, in the American Southwest, among the Tuareg—blueness repels evil. Blue glass bottles on windowsills keep devils out, and so on. Thus the front door, painted spirit blue, and the vibrant blue canopies above the windows.
17 | page: Location 1712
18 |
19 | - text: ‘Riding a bus has really been useful to me in terms of sleep,’ said Louise. ‘You know how intolerable it is, how awful you feel, after a night or two of sitting up to sleep on a bus? Your feet prickle, yeah, and the back? Agony.’ ‘Everything hurts,’ said Pollux. ‘That’s what I think about when I really can’t sleep. How desperately I wanted to stretch out on the floor in the middle aisle. I would not have cared how gross it was. Nothing. I’d have done anything just to stretch out. After I think about how cramped and desperate I was back then, I usually fall asleep.’
20 | page: Location 2170
21 |
22 | - text: The phone never stopped. The information in my head boiled over. Even though I wrote things down, my DO list kept accumulating. I began hearing the phones even after work, as I walked home, as I arrived home, all the time. Now, not only was I haunted at the bookstore, but the bookstore began to haunt me at home. Phones rang in my dreams. It was exhausting, but also there was something moving about this attention. Louise had been excited by the word ‘essential.’ As it turned out, books were important, like food, fuel, heat, garbage collection, snow shoveling, and booze. Phones ringing meant our readers had not deserted us and some far-off day they would walk into the bookstore again. Sometimes it was exhilarating to be needed. Sometimes I felt important.
23 | page: Location 3258
24 |
25 | - text: People wandered about like toddlers, bending over to look at last year’s dried grass. They watched the sky and examined the tags of newly planted city trees. And the air—it was a clean cold food. Sunlight hit my shoulders at an angle, just that slight burn promising summer. The city closed off parkways so people had room to walk outside and the paths were always full of people dodging one another, stepping off curbs and stumbling into gutters.
26 | page: Location 3312
27 |
28 | - text: Pollux was sitting at a little table next to the window. It was one of his workstations, which are scattered through the house and garage. He’d brought this table into our room when Hetta began to inhabit his office. It was the place he worked with the eagle feathers. They were beautiful mottled brown and white feathers, wing feathers, so they curved slightly. Pollux was straightening them out by stroking the spines on a hot lightbulb. He was wearing sunglasses against the glare. Over and over he drew the feather over the glass. This would only be normal in a Native person’s house. The feather gradually straightened. It took a long time. I watched him from under my pillows. The light lay on his hair, picking out silver, black, and white strands. The patience of him, the way he was devoted to that feather, worked on me. Again and again he warmed the feather, bent it the opposite direction, pulled it straight, warmed it again. He seemed the picture of human love. I knew the fan was for me. I knew the feathers actually were me—Tookie—straightened by warmth applied a thousand times.
29 | page: Location 3462
30 |
31 | - text: Jeronimo Yanez shooting Philando Castile in one annihilating movement. Seven shots. We’ll never be clean again, I remember thinking at the time. None of us who let this happen. But what had I done since? A few things. Not effective things.
32 | page: Location 3505
33 |
34 | - text: An elder announced that the jingle dress dance was meant to heal people and whoever needed healing could come forward. People moved in from every direction. They held one another up.
35 | page: Location 4201
36 |
37 | - text: "What flowed over me was not easy to feel and I resisted, but then a ripple of energy caught me up and spread, became wider, powerful, deep, musical, whole, universal: it was the drum. My hip pained me on the side where I came down hardest. I kept dancing. I saw spots and lights, nearly fainted, but still I danced, on and on."
38 | page: Location 4205
39 |
40 | - text: ‘A hummingbird remembers every flower it has ever sipped from,’ said Asema. ‘I remember every beer I’ve ever drunk with you,’ Pollux said to me.
41 | page: Location 4235
42 |
43 | - text: Pollux’s grandma had once told him dogs are so close with people that sometimes, when death shows up, the dog will step in and take the hit. Meaning, the dog would go off with death, taking their person’s place. I was pretty sure that Gary had done this for Roland and then visited the store to let me know.
44 | page: Location 4375
45 |
46 | - text: ‘I really believe that to live inauthentically is to live in a sort of hell.’
47 | page: Location 4928
48 |
49 | - text: You can’t get over things you do to other people as easily as you get over things they do to you.
50 | page: Location 5038
51 |
52 | - text: Mine is the god of isolation, the god of the small voice, the god of the little spirit, of the earthworm and the friendly mouse, the hummingbird, the greenbottle fly and all things iridescent.
53 | page: Location 5119
54 |
55 | - text: ‘You let the logs burn long enough so they made a space between them. You gotta keep the fire new. Every piece of wood needs a companion to keep it burning. Now push them together. Not too much. They also need that air. Get them close, but not on top of each other. Just a light connection all the way along. Now you’ll see a row of even flames.’
56 | page: Location 5222
57 |
58 | - text: Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie
59 | page: Location 5368
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/_data/books/tomorrow-and-tomorrow-and-tomorrow.yaml:
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1 | - text: To design a game is to imagine the person who will eventually play it.
2 | page: Location 417
3 | - text: "She drove a red, American-made convertible, with the top down if weather permitted (in Los Angeles, it usually did) and a silk printed scarf in her hair. She was barely five feet, only an inch taller than the eleven-year-old Sadie, but she was always dressed impeccably in the bespoke clothes she bought in Paris once a year: crisp white blouses, soft gray wool pants, bouclé or cashmere sweaters. She was never without her hexagonal weapon of a leather handbag, her scarlet lipstick, her delicate gold wristwatch, her tuberose-scented perfume, her pearls. Sadie thought she was the most stylish woman in the world."
4 | page: Location 421
5 | - text: There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.
6 | page: Location 1161
7 | - text: If Marx at twenty-two had a problem, it was that he was attracted to too many things and people. Marx’s favorite adjective was “interesting.” The world seemed filled with interesting books to read, interesting plays and movies to see, interesting games to play, interesting food to taste, and interesting people to have sex with and sometimes even to fall in love with. To Marx, it seemed foolish not to love as many things as you could.
8 | page: Location 1586
9 | - text: For Marx, the world was like a breakfast at a five-star hotel in an Asian country—the abundance of it was almost overwhelming. Who wouldn’t want a pineapple smoothie, a roast pork bun, an omelet, pickled vegetables, sushi, and a green-tea-flavored croissant?
10 | page: Location 1590
11 | - text: "Sam’s grandfather had two core beliefs: (1) all things were knowable by anyone, and (2) anything was fixable if you took the time to figure out what was broken."
12 | page: Location 1655
13 | - text: “Hi,” Sam said, without looking at her. “You can watch if you want. I’m going to play until the end of this life.” “That’s a good philosophy,” Anna said.
14 | page: Location 1877
15 | - text: The obvious place for them to go was Los Angeles, the city of her birth. She had resisted returning there because to return to one’s hometown felt like surrender.
16 | page: Location 1902
17 | - text: "She went to all of their usual Harvard Square haunts: the movie theater, the library, the Coop, the Mexican place, the video store in the Garage, the bookstore, the other bookstore, the other other bookstore…"
18 | page: Location 1930
19 | - text: By eleven-thirty, Sadie was in her pajamas, teeth brushed and flossed, ready to go to bed. She wondered if this was what other twenty-three-year-olds’ Friday nights were like. When she was forty, would she lament that she hadn’t had sex with more people and partied more? But then, she didn’t enjoy many people, and she had never gone to a party that she wasn’t eager to leave. She hated being drunk, though she did enjoy smoking a joint every now and then. She liked playing games, seeing a foreign movie, a good meal. She liked going to bed early and waking up early. She liked working. She liked that she was good at her work, and she felt proud of the fact that she was well paid for it. She felt pleasure in orderly things—a perfectly efficient section of code, a closet where every item was in its place. She liked solitude and the thoughts of her own interesting and creative mind. She liked to be comfortable. She liked hotel rooms, thick towels, cashmere sweaters, silk dresses, oxfords, brunch, fine stationery, overpriced conditioner, bouquets of gerbera, hats, postage stamps, art monographs, maranta plants, PBS documentaries, challah, soy candles, and yoga. She liked receiving a canvas tote bag when she gave to a charitable cause. She was an avid reader (of fiction and nonfiction), but she never read the newspaper, other than the arts sections, and she felt guilty about this.
20 | page: Location 2286
21 | - text: To return to the city of one’s birth always felt like retreat.
22 | page: Location 2424
23 | - text: Sam’s doctor said to him, “The good news is that the pain is in your head.” But I am in my head, Sam thought.
24 | page: Location 3117
25 | - text: She felt, in a way, that she finally understood Marx (though he was now effectively settled down with Zoe). Long relationships might be richer, but relatively brief, relatively uncomplicated encounters with interesting people could be lovely as well. Every person you knew, every person you loved even, did not have to consume you for the time to have been worthwhile.
26 | page: Location 3152
27 | - text: Despite the title, the cherry blossoms are not the subject; it is a painting about the creative process—its solitude and the ways in which an artist, particularly a female one, is expected to disappear.
28 | page: Location
29 | attribution: (regarding Cherry Blossoms at Night, by Katsushika Ōi)
30 | - text: It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.
31 | page: Location 3746
32 | - text: "It occurred to Sadie: She had thought after Ichigo that she would never fail again. She had thought she arrived. But life was always arriving. There was always another gate to pass through."
33 | page: Location 3759
34 | - text: He went to see another therapist to help with his driving anxiety. Sam hated therapy, but he needed to get places, and so, therapy it was. The easiest way to conquer a driving phobia, the therapist said, was to drive.
35 | page: Location 3982
36 | - text: “Your cousin Albert told me that, in business, they call this a pivot. But life is filled with them, too. The most successful people are also the most able to change their mindsets. You may not ever have a romantic relationship with Sadie, but you two will be friends for the rest of your lives, and that is something of equal or greater value, if you choose to see it that way.”
37 | page: Location 4082
38 | - text: “‘Zweisamkeit’ is the feeling of being alone even when you’re with other people.” Simon turned to look in his husband’s eyes. “Before I met you, I felt this constantly. I felt it with my family, my friends, and every boyfriend I ever had. I felt it so often that I thought this was the nature of living. To be alive was to accept that you were fundamentally alone.”
39 | page: Location 4439
40 | - text: The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that love is both a constant and a variable at the same time.
41 | page: Location 4904
42 | - text: What makes a person want to shiver in a train station for nothing more than the promise of a secret image? But then, what makes a person drive down an unmarked road in the middle of the night? Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans. Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.
43 | page: Location 6266
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/_data/books/turtles.yaml:
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1 | - text: As kids, Daisy and I had played all up and down the riverbank when the water was low like this. We played a game called “river kids,” imagining we lived alone on the river, scavenging for our livelihood and hiding from the adults who wanted to put us in an orphanage.
2 | page: Location 328
3 |
4 | - text: “I honestly can’t even tell if he’s cute.” “He’s in that vast boy middle,” she said. “Like, good-looking enough that I’m willing to be won over. The whole problem with boys is that ninety-nine percent of them are, like, okay. If you could dress and hygiene them properly, and make them stand up straight and listen to you and not be dumbasses, they’d be totally acceptable.”
5 | page: Location 534
6 |
7 | - text: Now you’re nervous, because you’ve previously attended this exact rodeo on thousands of occasions, and also because you want to choose the thoughts that are called yours.
8 | page: Location 585
9 |
10 | - text: Had you gotten some river water on your hand? It wouldn’t take much. Time to unwrap the Band-Aid. You tell yourself that you were careful not to touch the water, but your self replies, But what if you touched something that touched the water, and then you tell yourself that this wound is almost certainly not infected, but the distance you’ve created with the almost gets filled by the thought, You need to check for infection; just check it so we can calm down, and then fine, okay, you excuse yourself to the bathroom and slip off the Band-Aid to discover that there isn’t blood, but there might be a bit of moisture on the bandage pad. You hold the Band-Aid up to the yellow light in the bathroom, and yes, that definitely looks like moisture. Could be sweat, of course, but also might be water from the river, or worse still seropurulent drainage, a sure sign of infection, so you find the hand sanitizer in the medicine cabinet and squeeze some onto your fingertip, which burns like hell, and then you wash your hands thoroughly, singing your ABCs while you do to make sure you’ve scrubbed for the full twenty seconds recommended by the Centers for Disease Control, and then you carefully dry your hands with a towel.
11 | page: Location 587
12 |
13 | - text: Applebee’s is a chain of mid-quality restaurants serving “American food,” which essentially means that Everything Features Cheese.
14 | page: Location 648
15 |
16 | - text: “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough.”
17 | page: Location 699
18 | attribution: Toni Morrison
19 |
20 | - text: Everything was loud and bright. At the bar, people were shouting about some sports occurrence.
21 | page: Location 737
22 |
23 | - text: “So I made up an email address that looks almost exactly like Sandra Oliveros’s and emailed Bitterley an order to send me a copy of the police report. And he replied, like, ‘I can’t; I don’t have it on my home computer,’ so I told him to go the hell into the office and email it to me, and he was like, ‘It’s Friday night,’ and I was, like, ‘I know it’s Friday night, but the news doesn’t stop breaking on the weekend; do your job, or I’ll find someone else who will do it.’ And then he went to the fucking office and emailed me scans of the fucking police report.” “Jesus.” “Welcome to the future, Holmesy. It’s not about hacking computers anymore; it’s about hacking human souls. The file is in your email.” Sometimes I wondered if Daisy was my friend only because she needed a witness.
24 | page: Location 771
25 |
26 | - text: I like being outside at night. It gives me this weird feeling, like I’m homesick but not for home. It’s kind of a good feeling, though.
27 | page: Location 939
28 |
29 | - text: "I wanted to tell her that I was getting better, because that was supposed to be the narrative of illness: It was a hurdle you jumped over, or a battle you won. Illness is a story told in the past tense."
30 | page: Location 993
31 |
32 | - text: "“I want to share something Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’ And we’re such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn’t real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.”"
33 | page: Location 1033
34 |
35 | - text: Dr. Singh told me once that if you have a perfectly tuned guitar and a perfectly tuned violin in the same room, and you pluck the D string of the guitar, then all the way across the room, the D string on the violin will also vibrate.
36 | page: Location 1084
37 |
38 | - text: “Here at the Pickett residence, we have both kinds of movies—Star Wars and Star Trek. What would you prefer?”
39 | page: Location 1736
40 |
41 | - text: "Davis was already there, and he hugged me in the entryway before we got seated. A thought appeared in my mind undeniable as the sun in a clear sky: He’s going to want to put his bacteria in your mouth."
42 | page: Location 2721
43 |
44 | - text: “Do you feel like you’re getting better?” Everyone wanted me to feed them that story—darkness to light, weakness to strength, broken to whole. I wanted it, too.
45 | page: Location 2749
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/_data/books/upstream.yaml:
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1 | - text: In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed.
2 | page: Page 3
3 |
4 | - text: When the chesty, fierce-furred bear becomes sick he travels the mountainsides and the fields, searching for certain grasses, flowers, leaves and herbs, that hold within themselves the power of healing. He eats, he grosw stronger. Could you, oh clever one, do this? Do you know anything about where you live, what it offers? Have you ever said, “Sir Bear, teach me. I am a customer of death coming, and would give you a pot of honey and my house on the western hills to know what you know.”
5 | page: Page 6
6 |
7 | - text: With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats.
8 | page: Page 7
9 |
10 | - text: May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful. May I stay forever in the stream.
11 | page: Page 7
12 |
13 | - text: Give [the children] the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit.
14 | page: Page 8
15 |
16 | - text: Attention is the beginning of devotion.
17 | page: Page 8
18 |
19 | - text: I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel. Only in a secondary way is it an intellectual thing…
20 | page: Page 12
21 |
22 | - text: They have one responsibility—to stay alive, if they can, and be foxes.
23 | page: Page 16
24 |
25 | - text: I did not think of language as the means to self-description. I thought of it as the door—a thousand opening doors!—past myself. I thought of it as the means to notice, to contemplate, to praise, and thus, to come into power.
26 | page: Page 18
27 |
28 | - text: You must not ever stop being whimsical.
29 | page: Page 19
30 |
31 | - text: And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
32 | page: Page 19
33 |
34 | - text: …having chosen to claim my life, I have made for myself, out of work and love, a handsome life.
35 | page: Page 20
36 |
37 | - text: And that I did not give to anyone the responsibility for my life. It is mine. I made it. And can do what I want to with it. Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.
38 | page: Page 22
39 |
40 | - text: Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once.
41 | page: Page 23
42 |
43 | - text: But just as often, if not more often, the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself…
44 | page: Page 23
45 |
46 | - text: I am, myself, three selves at least.
47 | page: Page 24
48 |
49 | - text: Every day, twelve little bins in which to order disorderly life, and even more disorderly thought.
50 | page: Page 25
51 |
52 | - text: …in art as in spiritual life there is no neutral place.
53 | page: Page 27
54 |
55 | - text: The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
56 | page: Page 30
57 |
58 | - text: The water was deep and luminous and ever moving; the sky clean and distant; the mood more suitable for slow, long-limbed thoughts than for taking from even the simplest husk of body its final thimble of breath.
59 | page: Page 34
60 |
61 | - text: Just where does self-awareness begin and end? With the june bug? With the shining, task-ridden ant? With the little cloud of gnats that drifts over the pond? I am one of those who has no trouble imagining the sentient lives of trees, of their leaves in some fashion communicating or of the massy trunks and heavy branches knowing it is I who have come, as I always come, each morning, to walk beneath them, glad to be alive and glad to be there.
62 | page: Page 50
63 |
64 | - text: She [a turtle] sees me, and does not move. The eyes, though they throw small light, are deeply alive and watchful. If she had to die in this hour and for this enterprise, she would, without hesitation.
65 | page: Page 54
66 |
67 | - text: All his wildness was in his head—such a good place for it!
68 | page: Page 75
69 |
70 | - text: Poe claimed he could hear the night darkness as it pour, in the evening, into the world.
71 | page: Page 110
72 |
73 | - text: For whatever reason, the heart cannot separate the world’s appearance and actions from morality and valor, and the power of every idea is intensified, if not actually created, by its expression in substance. Over and over in the butterfly we see the idea of transcendence. In the forest we see not the inert but the aspiring. In water that departs forever and forever retrurns, we experience eternity.
74 | page: Page 114
75 |
76 | - text: Little by little, one or two, then a dozen, begin to drift into a wider constellation—toward the floor or the stair wall—spreading outward even as the universe is said to be spreading toward the next adventure and the next, endlessly.
77 | page: Page 124
78 |
79 | - text: Hope, I know, is a fighter and a screamer.
80 | page: Page 147
81 |
82 | - text: Through these woods I have walked thousands of times. For many years I felt more at home here than anywhere else, including our own house.
83 | page: Page 151
84 |
85 | - text: After Luke died, I crossed and recrossed the Province Lands, wherever we had been, and wherever I found her paw-prints in the sand I dragged branches and leaves and slabs of bark over them, so they would last, would keep from the wind a long time. Then overnight, after maybe three weeks, in a dazzling, rearranging rain, they were gone.
86 | page: Page 152
87 |
88 | - text: Now I think there is only one subject worth my attention and that is the precognition of the spirtual side of the world and, within this recognition, the condition of my own spiritual state.
89 | page: Page 153
90 |
91 | - text: I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and everything else, and that our dignity and our chances are one. The farthest star and the mud at our feet are a family; and there is no decency or sense in honoring one thing, or a few things, and then closing the list. The pine tree, the leopard, the Platte River, and ourselves—we are at risk together, or we are on our way to a sustainable world together. We are each other’s destiny.
92 | page: Page 154
93 |
94 | - text: For me the door to the woods is the door to the temple.
95 | page: Page 154
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/_data/books/ux-strategy.yaml:
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1 | - text: Intrapreneurship is the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization. You need to decide to take the fate of the product into your own hands through assertive risk-taking and innovation.
2 | page: Location 614
3 |
4 | - text: If you are doing best practices, you are not innovating.
5 | page: Location 623
6 | attribution: look up later
7 |
8 | - text: Two-sided markets are what make the Internet go around.
9 | page: Location 1059
10 |
11 | - text: The reality is that people often use products or combinations of products in ways that the product makers do not expect.
12 | page: Location 1242
13 |
14 | - text: Simply offering as many features as you can overlooks the holistic UX and business model, and it doesn’t address what features the customers actually want or need to accomplish their primary goal.
15 | page: Location 1617
16 |
17 | - text: The big payoff of exposing yourself to new experiences outside of your comfort zone is that they make it possible for us to grow as people. You change when you disrupt habitual patterns, and it affords you new ways of doing, being, and experiencing.
18 | page: Location 2132
19 |
20 | - text: Innovation can happen in small, incremental steps. You can innovate around a feature or an interface or in phases, and ultimately it builds up to this really extraordinary, meaningful, hard-to-replicate experience.
21 | page: Location 3734
22 |
23 | - text: Listen to those you don’t agree with. Are they making sense? Have you overlooked something? Seek opinions from people with different areas of expertise to gain different perspectives.
24 | page: Location 3754
25 |
26 | - text: The lesson is that strategy is iterative just like everything else. You come up with a hypothesis, you create a plan, and you move forward until you learn new information, reposition the hypothesis, and adjust the plan.
27 | page: Location 4079
28 |
29 | - text: We need to accept that failure, while an insurmountable barrier to some, might be an essential part of our product’s journey toward success.
30 | page: Location 4345
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/_data/books/why-buddhism.yaml:
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1 | - text: Sometimes understanding the ultimate source of your suffering doesn’t, by itself, help very much.
2 | page: Page 5
3 |
4 | - text: We spend more time envisioning the perks that a promotion will bring than envisioning the headaches it will bring. And there may be an unspoken sense that once we’ve achieved this long-sought goal, once we’ve reached the summit, we’ll be able to relax, or at least things will be enduringly better.
5 | page: Page 6
6 |
7 | - text: Natural selection doesn’t “want” us to be happy, after all; it just “wants” us to be productive, in its narrow sense of productivity. And the way to make us productive is to make the anticipation of pleasure very strong but the pleasure itself not very long-lasting.
8 | page: Page 8
9 |
10 | - text: "One thing I occasionally do when I’m feeling very sad…is sit down, close my eyes, and study the sadness: accept its presence and just observe how it actually makes me feel."
11 | page: Page 21
12 |
13 | - text: One of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we’d often be better off. Learning to do that is a big part of what mindfulness meditation is about.
14 | page: Page 27
15 |
16 | - text: Feelings are designed to encode judgments about things in our environment.
17 | page: Page 29
18 |
19 | - text: "True, pure enlightenment, in this view, is like what mathematicians call an asymptote: something you can get closer and closer to but never quite reach."
20 | page: Page 53
21 |
22 | - text: The idea of self is an imaginary, false belief which has no corresponding reality, and it produces harmful thoughts of ‘me’ and ‘mine’, selfish desire, craving, attachment, hatred, ill-will, conceit, pride, egoism, and other defilements, impurities, and problems. It is the source of all the troubles in the world from personal conflicts to wars between nations. In short, to this false view can be traced all the evil in the world.
23 | page: Page 59
24 | attribution: Walpola Rahula
25 |
26 | - text: So too with perceptions, mental formations, and consciousness. Are any of these things really under control—so completely under control that they never lead to suffering? And if they’re not under control, then how can we think of them as part of the self?
27 | page: Page 62
28 |
29 | - text: If you followed the Buddha’s guidance and abandoned the massive chunks of psychological landscape you’ve always thought of as belonging to you, you would undergo a breathtaking shift in what it means to be human. If you attained the state he’s recommending, this would be very different from having a self in the sense in which you’ve always had one before.
30 | page: Page 68
31 |
32 | - text: Separate the act of observation from the act of evaluation.
33 | page: Page 71
34 |
35 | - text: Think of yourself as having, in principle, the power to establish a different relationship with your feelings and thoughts and impulses and perceptions—the power to disengage from some of them; the power to, in a sense, disown them, to define the bounds of your self in a way that excludes them.
36 | page: Page 73
37 |
38 | - text: …sit down, close your eyes, focus on your breath, and then, once you start failing to focus on your breath (which shouldn’t take long!), try to focus on the things that are keeping you from focusing on your breath. And I don’t mean just focus on whatever thought is distracting you—I mean see if you can detect some feeling that is linked to the thought that is distracting you.
39 | page: Page 115
40 |
41 | - text: …brain scans are showing that a curious state of mind involves activity in the dopamine system, the system involved in motivation and reward, in desire and pleasure.
42 | page: Page 117
43 |
44 | - text: "[Judson] Brewer said the basic idea is to not fight the urge to, say, smoke a cigarette. That doesn’t mean you succumb to the urge and light up a cigarette. It just means you don’t try to push the urge out of your mind. Rather, you follow the same mindfulness technique that you’d apply to other bothersome feelings—anxiety, resentment, melancholy, hatred. You just calmly (or as calmly as possible, under the circumstances) examine the feeling. What part of your body is the urge felt in? What is the texture of the urge? Is it sharp? Dull and heavy? The more you do that, the less the urge seems a part of you; you’ve exploited the basic irony of mindfulness meditation: getting close enough to feelings to take a good look at them winds up giving you a kind of critical distance from them. Their grip on you loosens; if it loosens enough, they’re no longer a part of you. There’s an acronym used to describe this technique: RAIN. First you Recognize the feeling. Then you Accept the feeling and its relationship to your body. Finally, the N stands for Nonidentification, or, equivalently, Nonattachment."
45 | page: Page 135
46 |
47 | - text: The bad news is that you don’t exist; the good news is that you’re everything.
48 | page: Page 201
49 |
50 | - text: "Nothing possesses inherent existence; nothing contains all the ingredients of ongoing existence within itself; nothing is self-sufficient. Hence the idea of emptiness: all things are empty of inherent, independent existence."
51 | page: Page 202
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/_data/books/you-cant-touch-my-hair.yaml:
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1 | - text: It’s not easy, but I’m not easy, so we match.
2 | page: Location 585
3 |
4 | - text: Blackness is not a monolith. There’s nerdy black, jock black, manic pixie dream black, sassy black, shy black, conscious black, hipster black...the list goes on and on. But some people don’t want to believe that, because if varying degrees of blackness become normalized, then that means society has to rethink how they treat black people.
5 | page: Location 1147
6 |
7 | - text: coded language—which is language that, on the surface, seems to mean one thing to the average person but has a different, often pejorative, meaning to the person or group of people being talked about...
8 | page: Location 1903
9 |
10 | - text: Do everything you intend to do with no regard for how people want you or expect you to behave.
11 | page: Location 2938
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/_data/site.json:
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1 | {
2 | "title": "Melanie Richards’s book highlights",
3 | "description": "Some snippets I thought worth highlighting and saving for later",
4 | "url": "https://highlights.melanie-richards.com",
5 | "email": "hello@melanie-richards.com",
6 | "author": "Melanie Richards",
7 | "authorUrl": "https://melanie-richards.com",
8 | "images": "/assets/images/content",
9 | "twitter": "@somelaniesaid"
10 | }
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/_includes/footer.njk:
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