Evie Dunmore
- A Rogue of One's Own
It's quite the same. Idealism, cynicism. Two sides of the same coin. A yearning to control our fickle destinies. The cynic is but an idealist who preempts the shock of disappointment by deriding everything himself. Both have expectations that are rather too lofty.
Rosie Danan
- The Intimacy Experiment
There's a moment, when you're speaking to someone, and you're listening to something they said, or actually, maybe not, maybe you're just giving them your attention, holding a door open at the deli, and something shifts behind their eyes and you know that they feel seen. Not just seen but acknowledged in some way. They know they matter. That they're not alone. And when that happens, I think about all the times someone has done that for me.
Barack Obama
- A Promised Land - On the Essence of Politics
And that, I suppose, was the part of politics that would always give me the most pleasure: the part that wouldn't be diagrammed, that defied planning or analytics. The way in which, when it works, a campaign - and by extension a democracy - proved to be a chorus rather than a solo act.
P. Brown, M. McDaniel
- Brain Training - Making It Stick
A key determiner of fluid intelligence is the capacity of a person's working memory - the number of new ideas and relationships that a person can hold in mind while working through a problem - especially with some amount of distraction.
Atul Gawande
- Better - Diligence
We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success requires making a hundred small steps go right - one after the other, no slipups, no goofs, everyone pitching in.
Fatima Farheen Mirza
- A Place for Us
Her reflection. Her tired face. She touches her dry bottom lip and thinks of how odd it is to experience a secret loss. A loss without a name. The loss of a potential version of her life. Of what she never had, and now never will.
Edward Said
- Culture & Imperialism
Just as none of us is outside or beyond geography, none of us is completely free from the struggle over geography. That struggle is complex and interesting because it is not only about soldiers and cannons but also about ideas, about forms, about images and imaginings.
Kevin Kwan
- Rich People Problems
Scientists talk about how we inherit health issues from our parents through our genes, but we also inherit this entire lineage of fear and pain - generations of it.
Kevin Kwan
- Crazy Rich Asians
Eleanor had a long-held theory about men. She truly believed that for most men, all that talk of "being in love" or "finding the right one" was absolute nonsense. Marriage was purely a matter of timing, and whenever a man was finally done sowing his wild oats and ready to settle down, whichever girl happened to be there at the time would be the right one.
Leo Tolstoy
- On Freethinking
Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their minds without prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own customs, privileges, or beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right thinking.
Olivie Blake
- Divination for Skeptics
Perhaps love, or the approximation of it that this may or may not have been, would be something resembling a series of thrills. Highs and lows, pulses racing and collapsing; the plummeting sensation of disappointment mixing in with windows of contentment, and then spiking again where it came to anger and desire and, most obviously, sex. There had always been something adversarial about it to him; that love was, or should have been, a battle of some kind.
Jhumpa Lahiri
- The Namesake - Pet Names
Pet names are a persistent remnant of childhood, a reminder that life is not always so serious, so formal, so complicated. They are a reminder, too, that one is not all things to all people.
Siddhartha Mukherjee
- The Emperor of All Maladies - About Cigarettes
It remains an astonishing, disturbing fact that in America - a nation where nearly every new drug is subjected to rigorous scrutiny as a potential carcinogen, and even the bare hint of a substance's link to cancer ignites a firestorm of public hysteria and media anxiety - one of the most potent and common carcinogens known to humans can be freely bought and sold at every corner store for a few dollars.
Atul Gawande
- Complications - About Imperfections
No matter what measures are taken, doctors will sometimes falter, and it isn't reasonable to ask that we achieve perfection. What is reasonable is to ask that we never cease to aim for it.
Aziz Ansari
- Modern Romance
For me the takeaway of these stories is that, no matter how many options we seem to have on our screens, we should be careful not to lose track of the human beings behind them. We're better off spending quality time getting to know actual people than spending hours with our devices, seeing who else is out there.
Aravind Adiga
- Last Man in Tower
Because in this world, there is a line: on one side are the men who cannot get things done, and on the other side are the men who can. And not one in a hundred will cross that line. Will you?
M. M. Kaye
- The Far Pavilions
I cannot see anything admirable in stupidity, injustice and sheer incompetence in high places, and there is too much of all three in the present administration.
Aravind Adiga
- The White Tiger
See, the poor dream all their lives of getting enough to eat and looking like the rich. And what do the rich dream of? Losing weight and looking like the poor.
Atul Gawande
- The Checklist Manifesto
And the reason is increasingly evident: the volume and complexity of what we know has exceeded our individual ability to deliver its benefits correctly, safely, or reliably. Knowledge has both saved us and burdened us.
