2025 Books
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The law in this land is what the white man says it is, mister. Plain and simple.
… their yeshiva education useless, their proud history ignored, as the clankety-clank of American industry churned around them, their proud past as watchmakers and tailors, scholars and historians, musicians and artists, gone, wasted. American cared about money. And power. And government. Jews had none of those things; their job was to tread lightly in the land of milk and honey and be thankful that they were free to walk the land without getting their duffs kicked.
… Malachi has a lightness and boundless enthusiasm about worldly matters. He seemed to bring light and air and goodness to everything he touched. He marveled at the simplest items- an apple peeler, a barrel, a menorah, a paper cup, a marble- with enthusiasm and humor.
To her, the world was not a china closet where you admire this and don’t touch that. Rather, she saw it as a place where every each of living was a chance for tikkun olam, to improve the world. The tiny woman with the bad foot was all soul.
It was a future they couldn’t quite see, where the richness of all they had brought to the great land of promise would one day be zapped into nothing, the glorious tapestry of their history boiled down to a series of ten-second TV commercials, empty holidays, and sports games filled with the patriotic fluff of red, white, and blue, the celebrants cheering the accompanying dazzle without any idea of the horrible struggles and proud pasts of their forebears who had made their lives so easy.
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Speaking frankly and speaking the truth are two different things entirely. Honesty is to truth as prow is to stern. Honesty appears first and truth appears last. The interval between varies in direct proportion to the size of ship. With anything of size, truth takes a long time in coming. Sometimes it only manifests itself posthumously.
There's that kind of money in the world. It aggravates you to have it, makes you miserable to spend it, and you hate yourself when it's gone. And when you hate yourself, you feel like spending money.
Except there's no money left. And no hope.
Now all I know about her is my memories of her. And these memories fade further and further into the distance like displaced cells
Mediocrity is a constant.
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“My final destination? I don’t think humans are some self-driving car racing toward the finish line. We must own our lives, start the engine ourselves, and sometimes put on the brakes.” … If we live in the present, the future will follow accordingly. … There is no such future as grand as you imagine. There are only the exciting present and dreams for tonight.
“If you put it into perspective, the worst times of your life were times when you had to try your hardest to get through the trials. Now that you’ve already been through them, it all depends on how you see [traumatic event]. Isn’t it a testament to your strength, having overcome those times and prevailed?”
Freedom comes in different shapes and forms; every living thing is granted limited freedom. … Whatever it is that had you bound, …, please do not focus on those things. … The moment I decided not to look down and resolved to kick off the cliff and fly, I was finally able to complete this dream…
A great idea hinges on how much time you spend agonizing over it, and that’s what makes all the difference; whether you spent enough time searching for the answer or not.
He looked around at all the things inside his apartment that were shining is a new light against the sunset. … Enlightenment comes with time.
To accept your life as it is and be grateful. … I believe this will help you realise happiness has just been around the corner. xt goes here
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… but human society in general— how we equate verbal skills, especially oral fluency, with intelligence. And when you lose that, …it changes you.
Don’t let what you already have be the baseline. Think of yourself before you gained what you have, and remind yourself how much you want that, what you already have— your spouse/partner, your family, your house, your job. Imagine you in an alternate universe where you don’t have your family, can’t have your kids or your partner, how desperate that alternate-you would be to get what you have. Or if you don’t believe in the multiverse, the you from five years ago.
If you set the epistemological bar high enough, there are things that can never be proven; extreme skepticism leads to nihilism, the erasure of meaning.
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From her superior, a female: “The women take on all the cumbersome, minor tasks without being asked, while guys never do. Doesn’t matter if they’re new or the youngest— they never do anything they’re not told to do. But why do women simply take things upon themselves?”
From her husband: “Of course, one can’t go through life only doing what one wants to do. But Jiyoung, I’m doing what I want to do. I can’t advise you to do something you don’t want to do when I made you quit the job you enjoyed while I continue to do what I want to do.”
From her therapist, a male: “My wife is still doing the maths workbooks, and I wish she’d do something more interesting. Something she';s good at, that she likes, that she really wants to do, not something she does because there’s nothing else.
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Even the best female employees can cause many problems if they don’t have the childcare issue taken care of. I’ll have to make sure her replacement is unmarried.”From her mother: “…Don’t stay out of trouble. Run wild! Run wild, you hear me?”
Jiyoung became different people from time to time. Some of them were living, others were dead, all of them women she knew. No matter how you looked at it, it wasn’t a joke or a prank. Truly, flawlessly, completely, she became that person.
The world has changed a great deal, but the little rules, contracts, and customs had not, which meant the world hadn’t actually changed at all. She mulled over Daehyun’s idea that registering as legally married changed the way you feel about each other. Do laws and institutions change values, or do values drive laws and institutions ?
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
