The Birthday of the World and Other Stories by Ursula K Le Guin

A selection of my favorite passages from the book

Coming of Age in Karhide

★★★★☆ (4/5)

• Time is different here. I learned in school how the Orgota, the Ekumen, and most other people count years. They call the year of some portentous event Year One and number forward from it. Here it’s always Year One.
• We had dozens of different words for the way snow falls, descends, glides, blows, for the way clouds move, the way ice floats, the way boats sail; but not that word. Not yet. And so I don’t remember “flying.” I remember falling upward through the golden light.
• I was sick. My back ached all the time. My head ached and got dizzy and heavy. Something I could not locate anywhere, some part of my soul, hurt with a keen, desolate, ceaseless pain. I was afraid of myself: of my tears, my rage, my sickness, my clumsy body. It did not feel like my body, like me.
• A half year in pain from a shattered leg had darkened and matured the adventurous, mischievous child, teaching anger, pride, endurance.

The Matter of Seggri

★★★★☆ (4/5)

• Their gender imbalance has produced a society in which, as far as I can tell, the men have all the privilege and the women have all the power.
• Maybe some day it will be possible for a boy to choose his life. Among your peoples a man’s body does not shape his fate, does it? Maybe some day that will be so here.
• However well- meaning they were, they mostly frightened and confused me. But fear and confusion were an appropriate preparation.
• “How you play is what you win,”
• What is it like to return from the dead? Not easy. Not for the one who returns, nor for his people. The place he occupied in their world has closed up, ceased to be, filled with accumulated change, habit, the doings and needs of others. He has been replaced. To return from the dead is to be a ghost: a person for whom there is no room.
• This was our freedom: we were all ghosts, useless, frightened, frightening intruders, shadows in the corners of life. We watched life going on around us— work, love, childbearing, childrearing, getting and spending, making and shaping, governing and adventuring— the women’s world, the bright, full, real world— and there was no room in it for us. All we had ever learned to do was play games and destroy one another.
• That the story is never true, but that the lie is indeed a child of silence.

Un Chosen Love

★★★★☆ (4/5)

• They forget that human beings, while whining after the simple life, thrive on complexity.
• None of the flocks belonged to Meruo, whose people looked only to the sea, and farmed only the sea, and never walked if they could sail.
• One such night in early winter his feeling of being chafed, rubbed raw, like an animal fretting in a trap, all his nerve- ends exposed, was too much to endure. He dressed, very quietly for fear of waking Suord, and went barefoot out of their room, to get outdoors— anywhere out from under the roofs, he thought. He felt that he could not breathe.
• “Why do you stay?” she asked, not accusingly, but asking for an answer. “I love him,” Hadri said. “I don’t want to hurt him. If I run away I’ll be a coward. I want to be worth him.” They were four separate answers, each spoken separately, painfully.
• but what he wanted was to get Hadri alone, in a boat, where Hadri was not only useless but slightly uneasy and had no escape at all.
• These people had a capacity for remaining perfectly motionless and silent, like predatory animals, or fishing birds.

Mountain Ways

★★★★☆ (4/5)

• Then for half an hour nothing but the crisp whisper of the combs, the flutter of the unceasing wind over stones, the soft bleat of a calf, the faint rhythmical sound of the nearby beasts biting the thin, dry grass.
• Four souls and bodies and all the years of their four lives to come are in the balance in each of those decisions and invitations; passion, negative and positive, must find its channels, and trust must be established, lest the whole structure fail to found itself solidly, or destroy itself in selfishness and jealousy and grief.
• Akal had followed her far up the mountain, but would not follow her over a precipice.
• In general she had found that the main drawback in being a man was that conversations were less interesting.

Solitude

★★★★☆ (4/5)

• After the certain star sets you sleep until dawn wakes you. Then as always you greet the sunrise with aware silence.
• but my education was very difficult, sometimes. If only there were more stories and songs in her teaching, and not so many words, words that slipped away from me like water through a net!
• The Golden Time passed, and the beautiful summer; the Silver Time returned, when the mists lie in the valleys between the hills, before the rains begin; and the rains began, and fell long and slow and warm, day after day after day.
• The difference seemed total. He had been alone, without food, without shelter, a frightened boy trying to survive among equally frightened rivals against the brutality of older youths intent on having and keeping power, which they saw as manhood. I was cared for, clothed, fed so richly I got sick, kept so warm I felt feverish, guided, reasoned with, praised, befriended by citizens of a very great city, offered a share in their power, which they saw as humanity. He and I had both fallen among sorcerers. Both he and I could see the good in the people we were among, but neither he nor I could live with them.
• thinking is one way of doing, and words are one way of thinking.
• “You will never give in, will you, Ren?” she said to me one morning out of the silence of our breakfast. I had not intended the silence as a message. I had only rested in it.
• Solitude is noncommunication, the absence of others, the presence of a self sufficient to itself.
• A woman’s solitude in the auntring is, of course, based firmly on the presence of others at a little distance. It is a contingent, and therefore human, solitude.
• The mind always wants new happenings. So for the young soul there is wandering and scouting, travel, danger, change. But of course travel and danger and change have their own dullness. It is finally always the same otherness over again; another hill, another river, another man, another day. The feet begin to turn in a long, long circle. The body begins to think of what it learned back home, when it learned to be still. To be aware. To be aware of the grain of dust beneath the sole of the foot, and the skin of the sole of the foot, and the touch and scent of the air on the cheek, and the fall and motion of the light across the air, and the color of the grass on the high hill across the river, and the thoughts of the body, of the soul, the shimmer and ripple of colors and sounds in the clear darkness of the depths, endlessly moving, endlessly changing, endlessly new.
• By solitude the soul escapes from doing or suffering magic; it escapes from dullness, from boredom, by being aware. Nothing is boring if you are aware of it. It may be irritating, but it is not boring. If it is pleasant the pleasure will not fail so long as you are aware of it. Being aware is the hardest work the soul can do, I think.

Old Music and the Slave Women

★★★☆ ☆ (3/5)

• Most of it still stood, most of its fifteen million people were still there, but its deep complexity was gone. Connections were broken. Interactions did not take place. A brain after a stroke.
• Idle thoughts. During a revolution you don’t choose. You’re carried, a bubble in a cataract, a spark in a bonfire, an unarmed man in a car with seven armed men driving very fast down the broad, blank East Arterial Highway… They were leaving the city.
• His lungs were squeezed in his ribcage so that each breath was extremely difficult. He tried not to suffocate. He tried not to panic. He tried to be aware, only to be aware, but awareness was unendurable.
• He was glad, indeed, not to be obliged to talk about it, and hoped not to think about it. His body thought about it for him, remembered it precisely, in every joint and muscle, now. The rest of his thinking about it he would do as long as he lived. He had learned things he had not known. He had thought he understood what it was to be helpless. Now he knew he had not understood.
• The flowerbeds and shrubberies were untended, overgrown, but not yet gone wild. The gardens of Yaramera were utterly beautiful in their desolation. Desolate, forlorn, forsaken, all such romantic words befitted them, yet they were also rational and noble, full of peace. They had been built by the labor of slaves. Their dignity and peace were founded on cruelty, misery, pain.
• She nodded. The Werelian nod was a tip back of the head, not a bob down. He was completely used to it after all these years. It was the way he nodded himself. He noticed himself noticing it now. His captivity, his treatment here, had displaced, disoriented him.
• “I am not one of you. I neither own nor am owned. You must redefine yourselves to include me.”
• “A beautiful name. How old is he?” In the language they spoke that was, “How long has he lived?” Kamsa’s answer was strange. “As long as his life,” she said, or so he understood her whisper and her dialect. Maybe it was bad manners or bad luck to ask a child’s age.
• We followed his weakness. His incompleteness. Failure’s open. Look at water, Esi. It finds the weak places in the rock, the openings, the hollows, the absences. Following water we come where we belong.”
• This was a strange place to come to learn the quality of joy. Water is my guide, he thought. His hands still felt what it had been like to hold the child, the light weight, the brief warmth.
• He shouted once, “Let me out of here!” then got control of himself, returned to the cot, and after a minute sat down on the floor between the cot and the wall, as sheltered a place as the room afforded, trying to imagine what was going on.

The Birthday of World

★★★☆ ☆ (3/5)

• Maybe there would be no more time— no time coming behind our backs, only what lay before us, only what we could see with mortal eyes. Only our own lives and nothing else.
• The wars at the borders, the wars of conquest, had made our land too large. The people in the towns and villages knew no more who I was than I knew who they were.

Paradises Lost

★★★★★ (5/5)

• Their life is on another order. Orders, as a rule, cannot perceive one another except with instruments which allow perception of a different scale. With such an instrument one gazes in wonder at the world revealed. But the instrument has not revealed one’s larger- order world to that smaller- order world, which continues orderly, undisturbed and unaware, until the drop dries suddenly on the glass slide. Reciprocity is a rare thing.
• Dreams could also be convincing, beautiful, frightening, important. But she didn’t want to live in dreams. She wanted to be awake in her body touching true cloth, true metal, true skin.
• No danger from anything in the world but the danger the world itself was in. But that was a constant, a condition of being, and therefore hard to think about, except sometimes in dream; the horrible images. The walls of the world deformed, bulging, shattering. The soundless explosion. A spray of bloody mist, a tiny smear of vapor in the starlight. They were all in danger all the time, surrounded by danger. That is the essence of safety, the heart of it: that the danger is outside.
• The arrangement is, in fact, unfair. Sexuality and justice have little if anything in common. Love and friendship and conscience and kindness and obstinacy find ways to make the unfair arrangement work, though not without anxiety, not without anguish, and not always.
• History must be what we have escaped from. It is what we were, not what we are. History is what we need never do again.
• If everybody has access to the same food, clothing, furniture, tools, education, information, work, and authority, and hoarding is useless because you can have for the asking, and gambling is an idle sport because there’s nothing to lose, so that wealth and poverty have become mere metaphors—“rich in love,”“poor in spirit”—how is one to understand the importance of money?
• No matter how you civilised it, the body remained somewhat wild, or savage, or natural. It had to keep up its animal functions, or die. It could never be fully tamed, fully controlled.
• He mentally perceived words as having various sizes, densities, depths; words were dark stars, some small and dull and solid, some immense, complex, subtle, with a powerful gravity-field that attracted infinite meanings to them. Freedom was the biggest of the dark stars.
• “To speculate about our destination,” Tan said, “is to increase anxiety, impatience, and erroneous expectations.” He smiled slightly.
• “I don’t want to be in another person’s world, I want to be in mine,” she said. “You read novels,” he said. “Sure. But I do reading. The writer puts the story there, and I do it. I make it be. The v-programmer uses me to do his story. Nobody uses my body and my mind but me. OK?” She always got fierce.
• Within itself it was entirely self-sustaining, self-renewing. Every cell shed by human skin, every speck of dust worn from a fabric or a bearing, every molecule of vapor from leaf or lung, was drawn into the filters and the reconverters, saved, recombined, re-used, reconfigured, reborn. The system was in equilibrium.
• What did they need to know that they didn’t know? They knew that life was inside: light, warmth, breath, companionship. They knew that outside was nothing. The void. Death. Death silent, immediate, absolute.
• The “division of labor,” perhaps the oldest and deepest-founded of all the institutions of power-imbalance—was that irrational, fanciful set of prescriptions and proscriptions to be reinstituted here, where sanity and balance must, at the cost of life itself, be preserved?
• Shame and honor are powerful social engines. If enforced by total publicity and attached to rational need, rather than to hierarchic fantasies and the will to dominate, shame and honor can keep a society running steadily for a long time.
• Beneath their friendship was something that was not public, and was not friendship: a pledge made without words, but with the body; a non-action with profound results. They were each other’s privacy. They had found where away was. The key to it was silence.
• Inbliss has gradually changed the emphasis of this vision. Here is all. There’s nothing outside the ship—literally nothing, spiritually nothing. Origin and destination are now metaphors. They have no reality. Journey is the sole reality. The voyage is its own end.”

The Shobies’ Story

★★☆☆☆ (2/5)

• The word is Hainish and means “making a beginning together,” or “beginning to be together,” or, used technically, “the period of time and area of space in which a group forms if it is going to form.” A honeymoon is an isyeye of two.
• Unbreathing, the ghosts flitted, shifted, in the ghost shell of a cold, dark hull floating near a world of brown fog, an unreal planet. They spoke, but there were no voices. There is no sound in vacuum, nor in nontime.
• “Do you mean,” Lidi said in a tone of deep existential disgust, “that we have to believe in it to make it work?”“You have to believe in yourself in order to act, don’t you?” Tai said. “No,” the navigator said. “Absolutely not. I don’t believe in myself. I know some things. Enough to go on.”“An analogy,” Gveter offered. “The effective action of a crew depends on the members perceiving themselves as a crew—you could call it believing in the crew, or just being it—Right? So, maybe, to churten, we—we conscious ones—maybe it depends on our consciously perceiving ourselves as…as transilient—as being in the other place—the destination?”

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu

★★★★★ (5/5)

A selection of my favourite passages from the book

NOVA PACIFICA, 2313

“The past,” Ms. Coron continued, “thus accumulating bit by bit through recursion, becomes the future.”

Western-style cottage, paper suits, paper dress

“See how the universe is straightforward, but to understand it with the intellect, to turn it into language, requires a twist, a sharp turn? Between the World and the Word, there lies an extra curve.

Family is a story that is told to you, but the story that matters the most you must tell yourself.”

Sometimes understanding comes to you not through thought, but through this throbbing of the heart, this tenderness in the chest that hurts.

Maxwell’s Demon

A war opened a door in men, and whatever was inside just tumbled out. The entropy of the world increased, in the absence of a demon by the door. That was the way of war, wasn’t it?

The Reborn

“Do you not alter your behavior, your expressions, even your speech when you’re with your childhood friends from your hometown compared to when you’re with your new friends from the big city? Do you not laugh differently, cry differently, even become angry differently when you’re with your family than when you’re with me?”

The idea of a justice system so limited by the opacity of the individual that it must resort to ritualized adversarial combat rather than direct access to the truth of the mind must seem to them a barbarity.

The past does not die; it seeps, leaks, infiltrates, waits for an opportunity to spring up. You are what you remember.…”

Thoughts and Prayers

From afar, I watched the trolls swarm around my brother’s family with uncoordinated precision, with aimless malice, with malevolent glee.

Rather than focusing on judging the behavior of speakers, they’ve devoted resources to letting listeners shield themselves.

That this pro- free- speech ethos happens to align with more profit is no doubt a mere afterthought.

Sometimes I wonder if we have misunderstood the notion of freedom. We prize “freedom to” so much more than “freedom from.”

A public life is an inauthentic one. Anyone who enters the arena must be prepared for the consequences.

Byzantine Empathy

Smells probed into the deepest part of your brain and stirred up the rawest emotions, like the blade of a hoe breaking up the numbed clods of modernity to reveal the wriggling pink flesh of wounded earthworms.

A consensus of feelings had replaced the consensus of facts. The emotional labor of vicarious experience through virtual reality had replaced the physical and mental work of investigation, of evaluating costs and benefits, of exercising rational judgment. Once again, proof- of- work was used to guarantee authenticity, just a different kind of work.

As she put it, “America is only a democracy for those lucky enough to be Americans. To everybody else, it’s just a dictator with the biggest bombs and missiles.” She wants the perfection of disintermediated chaos rather than the imperfect stability of awed institutions that could be perfected.

Just because there’s suffering doesn’t mean there is always a better choice; just because people die doesn’t mean we must abandon greater principles. The world isn’t always black and white.

“Empathy isn’t always a good thing,” I say. “Irresponsible empathy makes the world unstable. In each conflict, there are multiple claims for empathy, leading to emotional involvement by outsiders that widens the conflict. To sort through the morass, you must reason your way to the least harmful answer, the right answer.

But I’ve learned over the years that rationality with her, as with many, is just a matter of rationalization. She wants a picture just big enough to justify what her government does.

Empathy for you is but another weapon to be wielded, instead of a fundamental value of being human.

The Gods Will Not Be Chained

The brain is holonomic. Each part of the mind, like points in a hologram, encodes some information about the whole image. We were arrogant to think that we could isolate the personality away from the technical know- how.”

Once you’ve experienced the impossible, no conspiracy seemed unbelievable.

Staying Behind

“They think they can cheat death. But they died the minute they decided to abandon the real world for a simulation. So long as there’s sin, there must be death. It is the measure by which life gains meaning.”

In my old existence, I felt life but dimly and from a distance, cushioned, constrained, tied down by the body. But now I am free, a bare soul exposed to the full tides of eternal Life.

She taught me that our mortality makes us human. The limited time given to each of us makes what we do meaningful. We die to make place for our children, and through our children a piece of us lives on, the only form of immortality that is real.

The Gods Will Not Be Slain

“The cables that make up the internet with pulses of light follow the right- of- way of nineteenth- century railroads, and those followed the wagon trails of pioneers, who followed the paths of the Indians before them. When the world falls apart, it falls apart in layers, too. We’re peeling away the skin of the present to live on the bones of the past.”

Apocalypse did not come with a bang, but slowly, as an irresistible downward spiral.

The Gods Have Not Died in Vain

The amount of energy it takes to run the infrastructure that would support the creation and delivery of a single tomato is many times what it took to build the Great Pyramid. Is it really worth enslaving the whole planet so that you can have the experience of a tomato through the interface of the flesh instead of generating the same impulse from a bit of silicon?”

Would that bring people closer, so that they all shared the same universe without the constraints of scarcity? Or would it push them apart, so that each lived in their own world, a king of infinite space?

Dispatches from the Cradle: The Hermit—Forty-Eight Hours in the Sea of Massachusetts

“But what does the job a person has been channeled into have to do with who they are?”

One night, as I lay in the habitat drifting over the balmy subtropical Pacific, the stars spun over my face in their habitual course, a million diamantine points of crisp, mathematical light. I realized, with a startled understanding reminiscent of the clarity of childhood, that the face of the heavens was a collage.

Only in solitude it is possible to live as self- contained as a star. I am content to have this. To have now.

“Who are we to warm a planet for a dream and to cool it for nostalgia?”

Grey Rabbit, Crimson Mare, Coal Leopard

miniature electronics that put brains in grains of rice, continent- spanning networks that fulfilled every desire, virtual gold summoned out of thin air… The laws of nature our ancestors thought they understood no longer applied, and monsters sprang forth in sea and on land, punishing them for their hubris.

She would listen, she would hide, she would scheme, she would even fight— but she would never turn away from the essence of compassion.

A Chase Beyond the Storms: An excerpt from ‘The Veiled Throne’, The Dandelion Dynasty, book three

To the south, the meteorological wonder loomed like a mountain range sculpted out of cyclones, typhoons, sheets of rain so dense that they might as wel be solid water, and roiling clouds lit up from within by bolts of lightning,

“Where does this obsession with living on in song and story instead of thriving in this world come from? The world right here, right now, between the Veil of Incarnation and the River- on- Which- Nothing- Floats, is where we can make the most difference.

‘Sometimes a paving stone is essential on the path to mine pure jade.’ Even an impractical idea may spark a better plan down the road.”

The Hidden Girl

“We’re all thieves in this world of suffering,”

“What is your code then?” “To disdain the moral pronouncements of hypocrites; to be true to my word; to always do what I promise, no more and no less. To hone my talent and wield it like a beacon in a darkening world.” I laugh. “What is your talent, Mistress Thief?” “I steal lives.”

“This is a time of chaos,” Teacher said. “The great lords of the land are filled with ambition. They take everything they can from the people they’re sworn to protect, shepherds who have turned into wolves preying on their flocks. They increase the taxes until all the walls in their palaces are gleaming with gold and silver; they take sons away from mothers until their armies swell like the current of the Yellow River; they plot and scheme and redraw lines on maps as though the country is nothing but a platter of sand, upon which the peasants creep and crawl like terrified ants.”

“We are the winter snowstorm descending upon a house rotten with termites,” she said. “Only by hurrying the decay of the old can we bring about the rebirth of the new. We are the vengeance of a weary world.”

Seven Birthdays

“I wish the kite could y higher,” I say, desperate to keep the words owing, as though unspooling more conversation will keep something precious aloft. “If I cut the line, will it fly across the Pacific?”

It isn’t right for one species in the latest stage of a planet’s long history to monopolize all its resources. It isn’t just for humanity to claim for itself the title of evolution’s crowning achievement. Isn’t it the duty of every intelligent species to rescue all life, even from the dark abyss of time? There is always a technical solution.

But isn’t it the dream of every species to have the chance to do it over? To see if it’s possible to prevent the fall from grace that darkens our gaze upon the stars?

She wraps me in a fierce hug, squeezing my face against hers. She smells like the glow of new stars being born in the embers of a supernova, like fresh comets emerging from the primeval nebula.

Cutting

The act of remembering is an act of retracing, and by doing so we erase and change the stencil.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

★★★★☆ (4/5)

A selection of my favourite passages

• Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
• Stepan Arkadyevitch was a truthful man in his relations with himself. He was incapable of deceiving himself and persuading himself that he repented of his conduct.
• That answer is: one must live in the needs of the day— that is, forget oneself.
• Stepan Arkadyevitch took in and read a liberal paper, not an extreme one, but one advocating the views held by the majority. And in spite of the fact that science, art, and politics had no special interest for him, he firmly held those views on all these subjects which were held by the majority and by his paper, and he only changed them when the majority changed them— or, more strictly speaking, he did not change them, but they imperceptibly changed of themselves within him.
• If there was a reason for his preferring liberal to conservative views, which were held also by many of his circle, it arose not from his considering liberalism more rational, but from its being in closer accordance with his manner of life.
• The principal qualities in Stepan Arkadyevitch which had gained him this universal respect in the service consisted, in the first place, of his extreme indulgence for others, founded on a consciousness of his own shortcomings; secondly, of his perfect liberalism— not the liberalism he read of in the papers, but the liberalism that was in his blood, in virtue of which he treated all men perfectly equally and exactly the same, whatever their fortune or calling might be; and thirdly— the most important point— his complete indifference to the business in which he was engaged, in consequence of which he was never carried away, and never made mistakes.
• It seemed to each of them that the life he led himself was the only real life, and the life led by his friend was a mere phantasm.
• He knew she was there by the rapture and the terror that seized on his heart.
• There are people who, on meeting a successful rival, no matter in what, are at once disposed to turn their backs on everything good in him, and to see only what is bad. There are people, on the other hand, who desire above all to find in that lucky rival the qualities by which he has outstripped them, and seek with a throbbing ache at heart only what is good. Levin belonged to the second class. But he had no difficulty in finding what was good and attractive in Vronsky.
• He did not in his heart respect his mother, and without acknowledging it to himself, he did not love her, though in accordance with the ideas of the set in which he lived, and with his own education, he could not have conceived of any behavior to his mother not in the highest degree respectful and obedient, and the more externally obedient and respectful his behavior, the less in his heart he respected and loved her.
• It was as though her nature were so brimming over with something that against her will it showed itself now in the flash of her eyes, and now in her smile. Deliberately she shrouded the light in her eyes, but it shone against her will in the faintly perceptible smile.
• “Yes?” said Anna softly. “Come now, let us talk of you,” she added, tossing her head, as though she would physically shake off something superfluous oppressing her. “Let us talk of your affairs. I got your letter, and here I am.”
• She had not been near Anna again since the beginning of the evening, and now again she saw her suddenly quite new and surprising. She saw in her the signs of that excitement of success she knew so well in herself; she saw that she was intoxicated with the delighted admiration she was exciting. She knew that feeling and knew its signs, and saw them in Anna; saw the quivering, flashing light in her eyes, and the smile of happiness and excitement unconsciously playing on her lips, and the deliberate grace, precision, and lightness of her movements.
• the irrepressible, quivering brilliance of her eyes and her smile set him on fire as she said it.
• Levin scarcely remembered his mother. His conception of her was for him a sacred memory, and his future wife was bound to be in his imagination a repetition of that exquisite, holy ideal of a woman that his mother had been.
• The coffee was never really made, but spluttered over everyone, and boiled away, doing just what was required of it— that is, providing much cause for much noise and laughter, and spoiling a costly rug and the baroness’s gown.
• “Oh, well, everything presents itself to me, in the coarsest, most loathsome light,” she went on. “That’s my illness. Perhaps it will pass off.”
• She was conscious herself that her delight sparkled in her eyes and curved her lips into a smile, and she could not quench the expression of this delight.
• He was very well aware that in their eyes the position of an unsuccessful lover of a girl, or of any woman free to marry, might be ridiculous. But the position of a man pursuing a married woman, and, regardless of everything, staking his life on drawing her into adultery, has something fine and grand about it, and can never be ridiculous; and so it was with a proud and gay smile under his mustaches that he lowered the opera- glass and looked at his cousin.
• No one is satisfied with his fortune, and everyone is satisfied with his wit.’”
• Meanwhile spring came on, beautiful and kindly, without the delays and treacheries of spring,— one of those rare springs in which plants, beasts, and man rejoice alike. This lovely spring roused Levin still more, and strengthened him in his resolution of renouncing all his past and building up his lonely life firmly and independently.
• Thus, in spite of his solitude, or in consequence of his solitude, his life was exceedingly full.
• But still he had that look Levin knew so well that always irritated him, a look of hopelessness and despondency. That look said: “That’s all very well, but as God wills.”
• Some mathematician has said that enjoyment lies in the search for truth, not in the finding it.”
• “Imagine! One can hear and see the grass growing!” Levin said to himself, noticing a wet, slate- colored aspen leaf moving beside a blade of young grass. He stood, listened, and gazed sometimes down at the wet mossy ground, sometimes at Laska listening all alert, sometimes at the sea of bare tree tops that stretched on the slope below him, sometimes at the darkening sky, covered with white streaks of cloud.
• You’ll say again that I’m a reactionist, or some other terrible word; but all the same it does annoy and anger me to see on all sides the impoverishing of the nobility to which I belong, and, in spite of the amalgamation of classes, I’m glad to belong. And their impoverishment is not due to extravagance— that would be nothing; living in good style— that’s the proper thing for noblemen; it’s only the nobles who know how to do it. Now the peasants about us buy land, and I don’t mind that. The gentleman does nothing, while the peasant works and supplants the idle man. That’s as it ought to be. And I’m very glad for the peasant. But I do mind seeing the process of impoverishment from a sort of— I don’t know what to call it— innocence.
• Levin scowled. The humiliation of his rejection stung him to the heart, as though it were a fresh wound he had only just received. But he was at home, and the walls of home are a support.
• Although all Vronsky’s inner life was absorbed in his passion, his external life unalterably and inevitably followed along the old accustomed lines of his social and regimental ties and interests.
• These two passions did not interfere with one another. On the contrary, he needed occupation and distraction quite apart from his love, so as to recruit and rest himself from the violent emotions that agitated him.
• She spoke the truth. If ever at any moment she had been asked what she was thinking of, she could have answered truly: of the same thing, of her happiness and her unhappiness.
• Vronsky had several times already, though not so resolutely as now, tried to bring her to consider their position, and every time he had been confronted by the same superficiality and triviality with which she met his appeal now. It was as though there were something in this which she could not or would not face, as though directly she began to speak of this, she, the real Anna, retreated somehow into herself, and another strange and unaccountable woman came out, whom he did not love, and whom he feared, and who was in opposition to him. But today he was resolved to have it out.
• When the three- mile steeplechase was beginning, she bent forward and gazed with fixed eyes at Vronsky as he went up to his horse and mounted, and at the same time she heard that loathsome, never- ceasing voice of her husband. She was in an agony of terror for Vronsky, but a still greater agony was the never- ceasing, as it seemed to her, stream of her husband’s shrill voice with its familiar intonations.
• To Konstantin Levin the country was the background of life, that is of pleasures, endeavors, labor. To Sergey Ivanovitch the country meant on one hand rest from work, on the other a valuable antidote to the corrupt influences of town, which he took with satisfaction and a sense of its utility. To Konstantin Levin the country was good first because it afforded a field for labor, of the usefulness of which there could be no doubt. To Sergey Ivanovitch the country was particularly good, because there it was possible and fitting to do nothing.
• The better he knew his brother, the more he noticed that Sergey Ivanovitch, and many other people who worked for the public welfare, were not led by an impulse of the heart to care for the public good, but reasoned from intellectual considerations that it was a right thing to take interest in public affairs, and consequently took interest in them. Levin was confirmed in this generalization by observing that his brother did not take questions affecting the public welfare or the question of the immortality of the soul a bit more to heart than he did chess problems, or the ingenious construction of a new machine.
• She is bound to be unhappy, but I am not to blame, and so I cannot be unhappy.”
• This playing with words, this hiding of a secret, had a great fascination for Anna, as, indeed, it has for all women. And it was not the necessity of concealment, not the aim with which the concealment was contrived, but the process of concealment itself which attracted her.
• “We all drove back to my place after the races. And always the same people, always the same. Always the same thing. We lounged about on sofas all the evening. What is there to enjoy in that? No; do tell me how you manage never to be bored?” she said, addressing Anna again. “One has but to look at you and one sees, here’s a woman who may be happy or unhappy, but isn’t bored. Tell me how you do it?”
• Every man who knows to the minutest details all the complexity of the conditions surrounding him, cannot help imagining that the complexity of these conditions, and the difficulty of making them clear, is something exceptional and personal, peculiar to himself, and never supposes that others are surrounded by just as complicated an array of personal affairs as he is. So indeed it seemed to Vronsky. And not without inward pride, and not without reason, he thought that any other man would long ago have been in difficulties, would have been forced to some dishonorable course, if he had found himself in such a difficult position. But Vronsky felt that now especially it was essential for him to clear up and define his position if he were to avoid getting into difficulties.
• In reality he had ceased to enjoy himself as long ago as the year before, when he went away to Moscow. He felt that this independent attitude of a man who might have done anything, but cared to do nothing, was already beginning to pall, that many people were beginning to fancy that he was not really capable of anything but being a straightforward, good- natured fellow. His connection with Madame Karenina, by creating so much sensation and attracting general attention, had given him a fresh distinction which soothed his gnawing worm of ambition for a while, but a week before that worm had been roused up again with fresh force.
• “I’m happy, very happy!” he said to himself. He had often before had this sense of physical joy in his own body, but he had never felt so fond of himself, of his own body, as at that moment. He enjoyed the slight ache in his strong leg, he enjoyed the muscular sensation of movement in his chest as he breathed.
• But this interview was still of the utmost gravity for her. She hoped that this interview would transform her position, and save her. If on hearing this news he were to say to her resolutely, passionately, without an instant’s wavering: “Throw up everything and come with me!” she would give up her son and go away with him. But this news had not produced what she had expected in him; he simply seemed as though he were resenting some affront.
• Sviazhsky was one of those people, always a source of wonder to Levin, whose convictions, very logical though never original, go one way by themselves, while their life, exceedingly definite and firm in its direction, goes its way quite apart and almost always in direct contradiction to their convictions.
• He considered human life only tolerable abroad, and went abroad to stay at every opportunity, and at the same time he carried on a complex and improved system of agriculture in Russia, and with extreme interest followed everything and knew everything that was being done in Russia. He considered the Russian peasant as occupying a stage of development intermediate between the ape and the man, and at the same time in the local assemblies no one was readier to shake hands with the peasants and listen to their opinion.
• “Italian bookkeeping,” said the gentleman of the gray whiskers ironically. “You may keep your books as you like, but if they spoil everything for you, there won’t be any profit.”
• Having lost his antagonist, Levin continued the conversation with the gray- whiskered landowner, trying to prove to him that all the difficulty arises from the fact that we don’t find out the peculiarities and habits of our laborer; but the landowner, like all men who think independently and in isolation, was slow in taking in any other person’s idea, and particularly partial to his own. He stuck to it that the Russian peasant is a swine and likes swinishness, and that to get him out of his swinishness one must have authority, and there is none; one must have the stick, and we have become so liberal that we have all of a sudden replaced the stick that served us for a thousand years by lawyers and model prisons, where the worthless, stinking peasant is fed on good soup and has a fixed allowance of cubic feet of air.
• She laid her two hands on his shoulders, and looked a long while at him with a profound, passionate, and at the same time searching look. She was studying his face to make up for the time she had not seen him. She was, every time she saw him, making the picture of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, impossible in reality) fit with him as he really was.
• There was apparently nothing extraordinary in what she said, but what unutterable meaning there was for him in every sound, in every turn of her lips, her eyes, her hand as she said it! There was entreaty for forgiveness, and trust in him, and tenderness—soft, timid tenderness—and promise and hope and love for him, which he could not but believe in and which choked him with happiness.
• She had completely guessed and expressed his badly expressed idea. Levin smiled joyfully; he was struck by this transition from the confused, verbose discussion with Pestsov and his brother to this laconic, clear, almost wordless communication of the most complex ideas.
• When Kitty had gone and Levin was left alone, he felt such uneasiness without her, and such an impatient longing to get as quickly, as quickly as possible, to tomorrow morning, when he would see her again and be plighted to her forever, that he felt afraid, as though of death, of those fourteen hours that he had to get through without her. It was essential for him to be with someone to talk to, so as not to be left alone, to kill time.
• All that night and morning Levin lived perfectly unconsciously, and felt perfectly lifted out of the conditions of material life. He had eaten nothing for a whole day, he had not slept for two nights, had spent several hours undressed in the frozen air, and felt not simply fresher and stronger than ever, but felt utterly independent of his body; he moved without muscular effort, and felt as if he could do anything. He was convinced he could fly upwards or lift the corner of the house, if need be. He spent the remainder of the time in the street, incessantly looking at his watch and gazing about him.
• After the conversation with Alexey Alexandrovitch, Vronsky went out onto the steps of the Karenins’ house and stood still, with difficulty remembering where he was, and where he ought to walk or drive. He felt disgraced, humiliated, guilty, and deprived of all possibility of washing away his humiliation. He felt thrust out of the beaten track along which he had so proudly and lightly walked till then. All the habits and rules of his life that had seemed so firm, had turned out suddenly false and inapplicable. The betrayed husband, who had figured till that time as a pitiful creature, an incidental and somewhat ludicrous obstacle to his happiness, had suddenly been summoned by her herself, elevated to an awe-inspiring pinnacle, and on the pinnacle that husband had shown himself, not malignant, not false, not ludicrous, but kind and straightforward and large. Vronsky could not but feel this, and the parts were suddenly reversed. Vronsky felt his elevation and his own abasement, his truth and his own falsehood. He felt that the husband was magnanimous even in his sorrow, while he had been base and petty in his deceit. But this sense of his own humiliation before the man he had unjustly despised made up only a small part of his misery. He felt unutterably wretched now, for his passion for Anna, which had seemed to him of late to be growing cooler, now that he knew he had lost her forever, was stronger than ever it had been. He had seen all of her in her illness, had come to know her very soul, and it seemed to him that he had never loved her till then. And now when he had learned to know her, to love her as she should be loved, he had been humiliated before her, and had lost her forever, leaving with her nothing of himself but a shameful memory. Most terrible of all had been his ludicrous, shameful position when Alexey Alexandrovitch had pulled his hands away from his humiliated face. He stood on the steps of the Karenins’ house like one distraught, and did not know what to do.
• Vronsky, meanwhile, in spite of the complete realization of what he had so long desired, was not perfectly happy. He soon felt that the realization of his desires gave him no more than a grain of sand out of the mountain of happiness he had expected. It showed him the mistake men make in picturing to themselves happiness as the realization of their desires.
• He felt now that he was not simply close to her, but that he did not know where he ended and she began. He felt this from the agonizing sensation of division that he experienced at that instant. He was offended for the first instant, but the very same second he felt that he could not be offended by her, that she was himself. He felt for the first moment as a man feels when, having suddenly received a violent blow from behind, he turns round, angry and eager to avenge himself, to look for his antagonist, and finds that it is he himself who has accidentally struck himself, that there is no one to be angry with, and that he must put up with and try to soothe the pain.
• But it is hard for anyone who is dissatisfied not to blame someone else, and especially the person nearest of all to him, for the ground of his dissatisfaction.
• “He is gone,” said the priest, and would have moved away; but suddenly there was a faint stir in the mustaches of the dead man that seemed glued together, and quite distinctly in the hush they heard from the bottom of the chest the sharply defined sounds: “Not quite … soon.” And a minute later the face brightened, a smile came out under the mustaches, and the women who had gathered round began carefully laying out the corpse.
• “And how strong they all are, how sound physically,” thought Alexey Alexandrovitch, looking at the powerfully built gentleman of the bedchamber with his well-combed, perfumed whiskers, and at the red neck of the prince, pinched by his tight uniform. He had to pass them on his way. “Truly is it said that all the world is evil,” he thought, with another sidelong glance at the calves of the gentleman of the bedchamber.
• And more hateful than anyone was Kitty for falling in with the tone of gaiety with which this gentleman regarded his visit in the country, as though it were a holiday for himself and everyone else. And, above all, unpleasant was that particular smile with which she responded to his smile.
• “It’s just this, my dear boy. One must do one of two things: either admit that the existing order of society is just, and then stick up for one’s rights in it; or acknowledge that you are enjoying unjust privileges, as I do, and then enjoy them and be satisfied.”“No, if it were unjust, you could not enjoy these advantages and be satisfied—at least I could not. The great thing for me is to feel that I’m not to blame.”
• Levin did not answer. What they had said in the conversation, that he acted justly only in a negative sense, absorbed his thoughts. “Can it be that it’s only possible to be just negatively?” he was asking himself.
• “And all this, what’s it for? What is to come of it all? That I’m wasting my life, never having a moment’s peace, either with child, or nursing a child, forever irritable, peevish, wretched myself and worrying others, repulsive to my husband, while the children are growing up unhappy, badly educated, and penniless.
• “And they attack Anna. What for? am I any better? I have, anyway, a husband I love—not as I should like to love him, still I do love him, while Anna never loved hers. How is she to blame? She wants to live. God has put that in our hearts. Very likely I should have done the same.
• I ought then to have cast off my husband and have begun my life fresh. I might have loved and have been loved in reality. And is it any better as it is? I don’t respect him. He’s necessary to me,” she thought about her husband, “and I put up with him.
• Abstractly, theoretically, she did not merely justify, she positively approved of Anna’s conduct. As is indeed not unfrequent with women of unimpeachable virtue, weary of the monotony of respectable existence, at a distance she not only excused illicit love, she positively envied it.
• “It’s our Russian apathy,” said Vronsky, pouring water from an iced decanter into a delicate glass on a high stem; “we’ve no sense of the duties our privileges impose upon us, and so we refuse to recognize these duties.”
• All that day it seemed to her as though she were acting in a theater with actors cleverer than she, and that her bad acting was spoiling the whole performance.
• The maternal cares and worries, which she had so hated on the way, now, after a day spent without them, struck her in quite another light, and tempted her back to them.
• “That’s the new generation of nobility.”“New it may be, but nobility it isn’t. They’re proprietors of a sort, but we’re the landowners. As noblemen, they’re cutting their own throats.”“But you say it’s an institution that’s served its time.”
• In solitude afterwards, thinking over that glance which had expressed his right to freedom, she came, as she always did, to the same point—the sense of her own humiliation. “He has the right to go away when and where he chooses. Not simply to go away, but to leave me. He has every right, and I have none.
• And though she felt sure that a coldness was beginning, there was nothing she could do, she could not in any way alter her relations to him. Just as before, only by love and by charm could she keep him. And so, just as before, only by occupation in the day, by morphine at night, could she stifle the fearful thought of what would be if he ceased to love her.
• I feel now how badly educated I am. To educate my children I positively have to look up a great deal, and in fact simply to study myself. For it’s not enough to have teachers, there must be someone to look after them, just as on your land you want laborers and an overseer.
• “If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied. And it’s true, as papa says,—that when we were brought up there was one extreme—we were kept in the basement, while our parents lived in the best rooms; now it’s just the other way—the parents are in the wash house, while the children are in the best rooms. Parents now are not expected to live at all, but to exist altogether for their children.”
• You speak of energy. Energy rests upon love; and come as it will, there’s no forcing it.
• While he followed this interesting conversation, Levin was all the time admiring her—her beauty, her intelligence, her culture, and at the same time her directness and genuine depth of feeling. He listened and talked, and all the while he was thinking of her inner life, trying to divine her feelings. And though he had judged her so severely hitherto, now by some strange chain of reasoning he was justifying her and was also sorry for her, and afraid that Vronsky did not fully understand her.
• She might pity herself, but he must not pity her. She did not want strife, she blamed him for wanting to quarrel, but unconsciously put herself into an attitude of antagonism.
• “Anna, what is it for, why will you?” he said after a moment’s silence, bending over towards her, and he opened his hand, hoping she would lay hers in it. She was glad of this appeal for tenderness. But some strange force of evil would not let her give herself up to her feelings, as though the rules of warfare would not permit her to surrender.
• He was colder to her than before, as though he were regretting his surrender. And she, remembering the words that had given her the victory, “how I feel on the brink of calamity, how afraid I am of myself,” saw that this weapon was a dangerous one, and that it could not be used a second time. And she felt that beside the love that bound them together there had grown up between them some evil spirit of strife, which she could not exorcise from his, and still less from her own heart.
• At that instant he knew that all his doubts, even the impossibility of believing with his reason, of which he was aware in himself, did not in the least hinder his turning to God. All of that now floated out of his soul like dust. To whom was he to turn if not to Him in whose hands he felt himself, his soul, and his love?
• And he was unutterably happy. That he understood; he was completely happy in it. But the baby? Whence, why, who was he?… He could not get used to the idea. It seemed to him something extraneous, superfluous, to which he could not accustom himself.
• “I assume that a salary is the price paid for a commodity, and it ought to conform with the law of supply and demand. If the salary is fixed without any regard for that law, as, for instance, when I see two engineers leaving college together, both equally well trained and efficient, and one getting forty thousand while the other is satisfied with two; or when I see lawyers and hussars, having no special qualifications, appointed directors of banking companies with immense salaries, I conclude that the salary is not fixed in accordance with the law of supply and demand, but simply through personal interest. And this is an abuse of great gravity in itself, and one that reacts injuriously on the government service. I consider….”
• His children? In Petersburg children did not prevent their parents from enjoying life. The children were brought up in schools, and there was no trace of the wild idea that prevailed in Moscow, in Lvov’s household, for instance, that all the luxuries of life were for the children, while the parents have nothing but work and anxiety. Here people understood that a man is in duty bound to live for himself, as every man of culture should live.
• Even the rare moments of tenderness that came from time to time did not soothe her; in his tenderness now she saw a shade of complacency, of self-confidence, which had not been of old, and which exasperated her.
• For an instant she had a clear vision of what she was doing, and was horrified at how she had fallen away from her resolution. But even though she knew it was her own ruin, she could not restrain herself, could not keep herself from proving to him that he was wrong, could not give way to him.
• “Respect was invented to cover the empty place where love should be.
• To die! and he will feel remorse; will be sorry; will love me; he will suffer on my account.” With the trace of a smile of commiseration for herself she sat down in the armchair, taking off and putting on the rings on her left hand, vividly picturing from different sides his feelings after her death.
• The question of the possibility of having children had long been a subject of dispute and irritation to her. His desire to have children she interpreted as a proof he did not prize her beauty.
• And remembering all the cruel words he had said, Anna supplied, too, the words that he had unmistakably wished to say and could have said to her, and she grew more and more exasperated. “I won’t prevent you,” he might say. “You can go where you like. You were unwilling to be divorced from your husband, no doubt so that you might go back to him. Go back to him. If you want money, I’ll give it to you. How many roubles do you want?” All the most cruel words that a brutal man could say, he said to her in her imagination, and she could not forgive him for them, as though he had actually said them.
• “Our parasites”; she remembered how Vronsky had said that. “Our? Why our? What’s so awful is that one can’t tear up the past by its roots. One can’t tear it out, but one can hide one’s memory of it. And I’ll hide it.”
• Yes, of what Yashvin says, the struggle for existence and hatred is the one thing that holds men together.
• Come, let me try and think what I want, to make me happy.
• And Levin, a happy father and husband, in perfect health, was several times so near suicide that he hid the cord that he might not be tempted to hang himself, and was afraid to go out with his gun for fear of shooting himself. But Levin did not shoot himself, and did not hang himself; he went on living.
• To me individually, to my heart has been revealed a knowledge beyond all doubt, and unattainable by reason, and here I am obstinately trying to express that knowledge in reason and words.
• I shall still be as unable to understand with my reason why I pray, and I shall still go on praying; but my life now, my whole life apart from anything that can happen to me, every minute of it is no more meaningless, as it was before, but it has the positive meaning of goodness, which I have the power to put into it.”

Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff… and it’s all small stuff by Richard Carlson

★★★★☆ (4/5)
A selection of my favourite passages

• Try to have compassion for the person and remember how painful it is to be in such an enormous hurry. This way, we can maintain our own sense of well-being and avoid taking other people’s problems personally.
• This strategy has nothing to do with ceasing to do your very best but with being overly attached and focused on what’s wrong with life.
• The solution is to notice what’s happening in your head before your thoughts have a chance to build any momentum. The sooner you catch yourself in the act of building your mental snowball, the easier it is to stop.
• Then, instead of obsessing on your upcoming day, you say to yourself, “Whew, there I go again,” and consciously nip it in the bud. You stop your train of thought before it has a chance to get going. You can then focus, not on how overwhelmed you are, but on how grateful you are for remembering the phone call that needed to be made.
• The nature of your “in basket” is that it’s meant to have items to be completed in it – it’s not meant to be empty. There will always be phone calls that need to be made, projects to complete, and work to be done. In fact, it can be argued that a full “in basket” is essential for success. It means your time is in demand!
• In reality, almost everything can wait. Very little in our work lives truly falls into the “emergency” category. If you stay focused on your work, it will all get done in due time.
• Think about it for a moment. When you hurry someone along, interrupt someone, or finish his or her sentence, you have to keep track not only of your own thoughts but of those of the person you are interrupting as well.
• when you surrender your need to hog the glory, the attention you used to need from other people is replaced by a quiet inner confidence that is derived from letting others have it.
• Mark Twain said, “I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”
• Your job is to try to determine what the people in your life are trying to teach you.
• You’ll discover the joy of participating in and witnessing other people’s happiness, which is far more rewarding than a battle of egos.
• I have found that, if you look deeply enough, you can almost always see the innocence in other people as well as in potentially frustrating situations.
• You can start with as little as five minutes and build up your capacity for patience, over time. Start by saying to yourself, “Okay, for the next five minutes I won’t allow myself to be bothered by anything. I’ll be patient.” What you’ll discover is truly amazing. Your intention to be patient, especially if you know it’s only for a short while, immediately strengthens your capacity for patience.
• Whenever we hold on to our anger, we turn “small stuff” into really “big stuff” in our minds. We start to believe that our positions are more important than our happiness. They are not.
• a year from now you aren’t going to care. It will be one more irrelevant detail in your life.
• “People are no longer human beings. We should be called human doings.”
• The beauty of doing nothing is that it teaches you to clear your mind and relax. It allows your mind the freedom to “not know,” for a brief period of time.
• Fortunately, there is an inviolable law in our emotional environment that goes something like this: Our current level of stress will be exactly that of our tolerance to stress. You’ll notice that the people who say, “I can handle lots of stress” will always be under a great deal of it! So, if you teach people to raise their tolerance to stress, that’s exactly what will happen.
• We take our own goals so seriously that we forget to have fun along the way, and we forget to cut ourselves some slack. We take simple preferences and turn them into conditions for our own happiness. Or, we beat ourselves up if we can’t meet our self-created deadlines.
• Using your back burner means allowing your mind to solve a problem while you are busy doing something else, here in the present moment.
• In other words, even though we often mess up, most of us are doing the best that we know how with the circumstances that surround us.
• Whether it’s ten minutes of meditation or yoga, spending a little time in nature, or locking the bathroom door and taking a ten-minute bath, quiet time to yourself is a vital part of life. Like spending time alone, it helps to balance the noise and confusion that infiltrate much of our day.
• Think of someone who truly irritates you, who makes you feel angry. Now, close your eyes and try to imagine this person as a tiny infant. See their tiny little features and their innocent little eyes. Know that babies can’t help but make mistakes and each of us was, at one time, a little infant. Now, roll forward the clock one hundred years. See the same person as a very old person who is about to die. Look at their worn-out eyes and their soft smile, which suggests a bit of wisdom and the admission of mistakes made. Know that each of us will be one hundred years old, alive or dead, before too many decades go by. You can play with this technique and alter it in many ways. It almost always provides the user with some needed perspective and compassion.
• Essentially, “seek first to understand” implies that you become more interested in understanding others and less in having other people understand you. It means mastering the idea that if you want quality, fulfilling communication that is nourishing to you and others, understanding others must come first. When you understand where people are coming from, what they are trying to say, what’s important to them, and so forth, being understood flows naturally; it falls into place with virtually no effort.
• Effective listening is more than simply avoiding the bad habit of interrupting others while they are speaking or finishing their sentences. It’s being content to listen to the entire thought of someone rather than waiting impatiently for your chance to respond.
• We often treat communication as if it were a race.
• If your primary goal isn’t to have everything work out perfectly but instead to live a relatively stress-free life, you’ll find that most battles pull you away from your most tranquil feelings.
• In low moods we lose our perspective and everything seems urgent. We completely forget that when we are in a good mood, everything seems so much better. We experience the identical circumstances – who we are married to, where we work, the car we drive, our potential, our childhood entirely differently, depending on our mood! When we are low, rather than blaming our mood as would be appropriate, we instead tend to feel that our whole life is wrong.
• When you’re in an ill mood, learn to pass it off as simply that: an unavoidable human condition that will pass with time, if you leave it alone, A low mood is not the time to analyze your life.
• The trick is to be grateful for our good moods and graceful in our low moods not taking them too seriously. The next time you feel low, for whatever reason, remind yourself, “This too shall pass.” It will,
• When you look at life and its many challenges as a test, or series of tests, you begin to see each issue you face as an opportunity to grow, a chance to roll with the punches. Whether you’re being bombarded with problems, responsibilities, even insurmountable hurdles, when looked at as a test, you always have a chance to succeed, in the sense of rising above that which is challenging you. If, on the other hand, you see each new issue you face as a serious battle that must be won in order to survive, you’re probably in for a very rocky journey.
• it simply means having the perspective to give others the benefit of the doubt.
• Seeing the innocence is a powerful tool for transformation that means when someone is acting in a way that we don’t like, the best strategy for dealing with that person is to distance ourselves from the behavior; to “look beyond it,” so that we can see the innocence in where the behavior is coming from.
• Underneath even the most annoying behavior is a frustrated person who is crying out for compassion.
• I’m not suggesting that it’s not okay for you to be right – only that if you insist on being right, there is often a price to pay – your inner peace.
• Humility and inner peace go hand in hand. The less compelled you are to try to prove yourself to others, the easier it is to feel peaceful inside.
• People are drawn to those with a quiet, inner confidence, people who don’t need to make themselves look good, be “right” all the time, or steal the glory. Most people love a person who doesn’t need to brag, a person who shares from his or her heart and not from his or her ego.
• It’s really difficult to become a contented person if you’re keeping score of all you do. Keeping track only discourages you by cluttering your mind with who’s doing what, who’s doing more, and so forth.
• Making things like garbage less relevant in your life will undoubtedly free up more time and energy for truly important things.
• Occasional harmless comments have an insidious tendency to become a way of looking at life. When you are weatherproofing another human being, it says nothing about them – but it does define you as someone who needs to be critical.
• One of the cardinal rules of joyful living is that judging others takes a great deal of energy and, without exception, pulls you away from where you want to be.
• When we judge or criticize another person, it says nothing about that person; it merely says something about our own need to be critical.
• there are many times when simply agreeing with criticism defuses the situation, satisfies a person’s need to express a point of view, offers you a chance to learn something about yourself by seeing a grain of truth in another position, and, perhaps most important, provides you an opportunity to remain calm.
• When you expect something to break, you’re not surprised or disappointed when it does. Instead of becoming immobilized when something is destroyed, you feel grateful for the time you have had.
• This philosophy is not a prescription for becoming passive or apathetic, but for making peace with the way things are. When your drinking glass does break, this philosophy allows you to maintain your perspective. Rather than thinking, “Oh my God,” you’ll find yourself thinking, “Ah, there it goes.”
• As you focus more on becoming more peaceful with where you are, rather than focusing on where you would rather be, you begin to find peace right now, in the present. Then, as you move around, try new things, and meet new people, you carry that sense of inner peace with you. It’s absolutely true that “Wherever you go, there you are.”
• The strategy itself is remarkably simple. It involves nothing more than pausing – breathing – after the person to whom you are speaking is finished.
• This harried form of communication encourages us to criticize points of view, overreact, misinterpret meaning, impute false motives, and form opinions, all before our fellow communicator is even finished speaking. No wonder we are so often annoyed, bothered, and irritated with one another. Sometimes, with our poor listening skills, it’s a miracle that we have any friends at all!
• Being more relaxed involves training yourself to respond differently to the dramas of life-turning your melodrama into a mellow-drama. It comes, in part, from reminding yourself over and over again (with loving kindness and patience) that you have a choice in how you respond to life.
• A closed mind is always fighting to keep everything else at arm’s length.
• The eye of the storm is that one specific spot in the center of a twister, hurricane, or tornado that is calm, almost isolated from the frenzy of activity. Everything around the center is violent and turbulent, but the center remains peaceful. How nice it would be if we too could be calm and serene in the midst of chaos – in the eye of the storm.
• You’ll find that if you create the goal to become more flexible, some wonderful things will begin to happen: You’ll feel more relaxed, yet you won’t sacrifice any productivity. You may even become more productive because you won’t need to expend so much energy being upset and worried
• there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way
• Pascal said, “All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” I’m not sure I would go quite this far, but I am certain that a quiet mind is the foundation of inner peace. And inner peace translates into outer peace.
• the amount of stress we feel has more to do with how we relate to our problems than it does with the problems themselves.
• Mentally, hold the problem near to your heart. Ask yourself what valuable lesson(s) this problem might be able to teach you. Could it be teaching you to be more careful or patient? Does it have anything to do with greed, envy, carelessness, or forgiveness? Or something equally powerful?
• Practice the strategies, keep them in mind, yet don’t worry about being perfect. Cut yourself some slack!
• Circumstances don’t make a person, they reveal him or her.
• when you are upset, you are playing a key role in the creation of your own feelings. This means that you can also play a key role in creating new, more positive feelings
• Perhaps Benjamin Franklin said it best: “Our limited perspective, our hopes and fears become our measure of life, and when circumstances don’t fit our ideas, they become our difficulties.”
• True happiness comes not when we get rid of all of our problems, but when we change our relationship to them, when we see our problems as a potential source of awakening, opportunities to practice patience, and to learn. Perhaps the most basic principle of spiritual life is that our problems are the best places to practice keeping our hearts open.
• If being peaceful and loving are among your primary goals, then why not redefine your most meaningful accomplishments as being those that support and measure qualities such as kindness and happiness?
• Developing a more tranquil outlook on life requires that we know our own limits and that we take responsibility for our part in the process.
• It’s enormously helpful to experiment with the awareness that life is just one thing after another. One present moment followed by another present moment.
• If you regularly take a minute to check in with yourself, to ask yourself, “What’s really important?” you may find that some of the choices you are making are in conflict with your own stated goals. This strategy can help you align your actions with your goals and encourage you to make more conscious, loving decisions.
• If, for example, you get the message to write or call someone you love, go ahead and do it. If your intuitive heart says you need to slow down or take more time for yourself, try to make it happen. If you’re reminded of a habit that needs attention, pay attention. You’ll find that when your intuition gives you messages and you respond with action, you’ll often be rewarded with positive, loving experiences.
• Minding your own business goes far beyond simply avoiding the temptation to try to solve other people’s problems. It also includes eavesdropping, gossiping, talking behind other people’s backs, and analyzing or trying to figure out other people. One of the major reasons most of us focus on the shortcomings or problems of others is to avoid looking at ourselves.
• When you catch yourself involved where you really don’t belong, congratulate yourself for having the humility and wisdom to back off.
• We argue for our limitations, and they become our limitations.

You Are Not A Gadget by Jaron Lanier

★★☆☆☆ (2/5)

A selection of my favorite passages from the book

• I want to say: You have to be somebody before you can share yourself.
• The World Wide Web was flooded by a torrent of petty designs sometimes called web 2.0. This ideology promotes radical freedom on the surface of the web, but that freedom, ironically, is more for machines than people. Nevertheless, it is sometimes referred to as “open culture.”
• It is impossible to work with information technology without also engaging in social engineering.
• Antihuman rhetoric is fascinating in the same way that self-destruction is fascinating: it offends us, but we cannot look away.
• Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it’s even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not?
• Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn’t get what it wants.
• If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you’ve let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?
• What these critics forget is that printing presses in themselves provide no guarantee of an enlightened outcome. People, not machines, made the Renaissance. The printing that takes place in North Korea today, for instance, is nothing more than propaganda for a personality cult. What is important about printing presses is not the mechanism, but the authors.
• An individual who is receiving a flow of reports about the romantic status of a group of friends must learn to think in the terms of the flow if it is to be perceived as worth reading at all. So here is another example of how people are able to lessen themselves so as to make a computer seem accurate.
• Without an independent press, composed of heroic voices, the collective becomes stupid and unreliable,
• What is crucial about modernity is that structure and constraints were part of what sped up the process of technological development, not just pure openness and concessions to the collective.
• I have tried to learn to be aware of the troll within myself. I notice that I can suddenly become relieved when someone else in an online exchange is getting pounded or humiliated, because that means I’m safe for the moment. If someone else’s video is being ridiculed on YouTube, then mine is temporarily protected. But that also means I’m complicit in a mob dynamic.
• Colonialism and conquest were ways to generate wealth that were distinguishable from technological improvement, though the military and technological domains have always been tightly correlated. The discovery of fresh natural resources, like a new oil field, can also expand wealth. But we can no longer count on forms of wealth expansion outside of technological innovation. The low-hanging fruit have been plucked. Only extreme inventiveness can expand wealth now.
• If you want to know what’s really going on in a society or ideology, follow the money. If money is flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists, then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty. If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed and contentless.
• Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising.
• The time has come to ask, “Are we building the digital utopia for people or machines?”
• The United States still has top universities and corporate labs, so we’d like the world to continue to accept intellectual property laws that send money our way based on our ideas, even when those ideas are acted on by others. We’d like to indefinitely run the world’s search engines, computing clouds, advertising placement services, and social networks, even as our old friend/demon Moore’s law makes it possible for new competitors to suddenly appear with ever greater speed and thrift.
• There are so many layers of abstraction between the new kind of elite investor and actual events on the ground that the investor no longer has any concept of what is actually being done as a result of investments.
• According to the new ideology, which is a blending of cyber-cloud faith and neo-Milton Friedman economics, the market will not only do what’s best, it will do better the less people understand it.
• Even if a robot that maintains your health will only cost a penny in some advanced future, how will you earn that penny? Manual labor will be unpaid, since cheap robots will do it.
• Perceptions of fairness and social norms can support or undermine any economic idea.
• First-order expression is when someone presents a whole, a work that integrates its own worldview and aesthetic. It is something genuinely new in the world. Second-order expression is made of fragmentary reactions to first-order expression.
• At the time that the web was born, in the early 1990s, a popular trope was that a new generation of teenagers, reared in the conservative Reagan years, had turned out exceptionally bland. The members of “Generation X” were characterized as blank and inert. The anthropologist Steve Barnett compared them to pattern exhaustion, a phenomena in which a culture runs out of variations of traditional designs in their pottery and becomes less creative.
• whole point of connected media technologies was that we were supposed to come up with new, amazing cultural expression. No, more than that—we were supposed to invent better fundamental types of expression: not just movies, but interactive virtual worlds; not just games, but simulations with moral and aesthetic profundity.
• Computers can take your ideas and throw them back at you in a more rigid form, forcing you to live within that rigidity unless you resist with significant force.
• The convenience factor is real, but part of the reason is that Wikipedia provides search engines with a way to be lazy.
• It is awkward to study neuroscience, for instance, if you assume that the brain is linked to some other entity—a soul—on a spirit plane. You have to treat the brain simply as a mechanism you don’t understand if you are to improve your understanding of it through experiment.
• A smell is a synecdoche: a part standing in for the whole.
• If we had infinite brains, capable of using an infinite number of words, those words would mean nothing, because each one would have too specific a usage. Our early hominid ancestors were spared from that problem, but with the coming of the internet, we are in danger of encountering it now. Or, more precisely, we are in danger of pretending with such intensity that we are encountering it that it might as well be true.
• In the future, I fully expect children to turn into molecules and triangles in order to learn about them with a somatic, “gut” feeling.