Sometimes it’s OK just to read whatever seems most fun. Spending half an hour reading something interesting, moving, awe-inspiring or merely amusing might be worth doing, not just to improve who you become in the future – though it might do that too – but for the sake of that very half hour of being alive.

‘C’est fait par du monde.’ Roughly: ‘People did that.’

The point isn’t to deny that reality, but to avoid worsening it – and specifically not to turn the fact that life can be difficult into a judgment of inadequacy on your part.

The only two questions, at any moment of choice in life, is what the price is, and whether or not it’s worth paying.

he never asserts that his choice of path ‘made all the difference’ in his life, either. How could he know, since he never got to compare it to the other one?

‘It helps if you can realize that this part of life when you don’t know what’s coming is often the part that people look back on with the greatest affection.’ – ANN PATCHETT

consuming information is a present-moment activity, like everything else.

It’s grimly amusing to reflect that at an earlier stage in the history of the internet, information overload was widely held to be a temporary problem.

this feeling of both acting on the world and being acted on by it, engaging with it boldly yet never knowing how it will respond – and the feelings of warmth and fulfillment that result