dog-earedthoughts

[dog-earedthoughts]

“The world ain't straight. You grow up thinking things are a certain way. You think there are rules. You think there's a way that things have to be. You try to live straight. But the world doesn't care about your rules, or what you believe. The world ain't straight, Vivian. Never will be. Our rules, they don't mean a thing. The world just happens to you sometimes, is what I think. And people just gotta keep moving through it, best they can.”

- Elizabeth Gilbert, City of Girls

[dog-earedthoughts]

He believed in good omens and positive thoughts and happy endings to films, a trouble-free belief, because he had not considered them deeply before choosing to believe; he just simply believed.

Chinmamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah

[dog-earedthoughts]

“One of my biggest fears is that I will never cut away all that scar tissue. One of my biggest hopes is that one day, I will have cut away most of that scar tissue.”

- Roxane Gay, Hunger

[dog-earedthoughts]

“What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrom, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”

- Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

[dog-earedthoughts]

It's futile to try to teach everything to everyone. Instead, we should play to individuals' strengths, allowing people to blossom in the roles that they're best at playing. We should also value skills that enable people to work well with others, skills like empathy and the ability to listen. This also means teaching critical thinking skills, not focusing just on facts, to facilitate communication and an interchange of ideas. This is the value of a liberal education, as opposed to learning what you need to get a job.

The Knowledge Illusion by Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach

[dog-earedthoughts]

“I knew too much about life to pretend that it wasn’t half tragedy. We lose the people we love. We disappoint each other. We misunderstand. We get lost and lonely and angry.

But right now, in this moment, we were okay.

Better than okay.”

Katherine Center, Things You Save in a Fire

[dog-earedthoughts]

How can there be so few individuals who understand the need for people to have a space of their own? Does it take a time of crisis for us to see the plight of the homeless? Must they be escaping a war zone to be in need? As a people, can we only respond to need if we perceive it to be valid?

Raynor Winn, The Salt Path

[dog-earedthoughts]

Drawn to the edge, a strip of wilderness where we could be free to let the answers come, or not, to find a way of accepting life, our life, whatever that was. Were we searching this narrow margin between the land and sea for another way of being, becoming edgelanders along the way? Struck between one world and the next. Walking a thin line between tame and wild, lost and found, life and death, At the edge of existence.

Raynor Winn, The Salt Path

[dog-earedthoughts]

“It was fair to say that almost everyone at the parlor wanted to make some extra money by gambling. However, the players also came to escape the eerily quiet steeets where few said hello, to keep away from the loveless homes where wives slept with children instead of husbands, and to avoid the overheated rush-hour train cars where it was okay to push but not okay to talk to strangers.”

- Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

[dog-earedthoughts]

“She couldn’t say this to her son, however, because Noa was someone who had studied, labored, and tried to lift himself out of their street, and he thought all the men who hadn’t done so weren’t very bright, either. He would not understand. Her son could not feel compassion for those who did not try.”

- Min Jin Lee, Pachinko

[dog-earedthoughts]

'Am I a proper girl?' I look from myself to the women around me and I feel that I do not measure up. And then that's when I know that I am a girl, that I am proper. Because, of course, this paranoia, that I am not feminine enough, not desirable enough, not good enough, is the ultimate performance of femininity. This paranoia is a crucial part of how women are policed. And of how we police ourselves.

Emilie Pine, Notes to Self

[dog-earedthoughts]

In this story, which I may never stop telling, I try to remember what it was like for me as a child, and what I did and what I could have done differently. I try to imagine what it was like for my parents, and what they did and what they could have done differently. I remember us happy, and I remember us sad. I remember us divided and I remember us together. I remember everything, and I remember only fragments of a whole that will always be beyond me.

Emilie Pine, Notes to Self

[dog-earedthoughts]

If a bad situation is “not your fight,” then what is your obligation?

Katherine Eban, Bottle of Lies

[dog-earedthoughts]

“Finally, I dedicate this book to all the runners I’ve encountered on the road - those I’ve passed, and those who’ve passed me. Without all of you, I never would have kept on running.”

-Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

[dog-earedthoughts]

“The thoughts that occur to me while I’m running are like clouds in the sky. Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky. The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.”

- Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running

[dog-earedthoughts]

“Our friends are not our second choices. They are our dates for Friday nights and for ex-boyfriends’ weddings. They are the visitors to our hometowns and hospital rooms. They are the first people we tell about any news, whether it’s good, terrible, or mundane. They are our plus ones at office parties. They are the people we’re raising children with. They are our advocates, who, no matter what, make us feel like we won’t fail. They are the people who will struggle with us and who will stay with us. They are who we text when we get home.”

- Kayleen Schaefer, Text Me When You Get Home

[dog-earedthoughts]

...I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing - nobody is missing like that, no one has ever had that luxury and no one ever will. It doesn't seem like much now, but realizations rarely do, I supposed, those bright moments when you can finally see something that had been there all along.

Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing