between the world and the self
He who gets behind in a race must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.
Colson Whitehead • The Nickel Boys
There is no escape from your own subjectivity. At present, the world seems complicated and mysterious to you, but if you change, the world will appear more simple. The issue is not about how the world is, but about how you are.
Notes & Highlights for The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi
Reassembling those fragments into confirmation of a shared darkness: If it is true for you, it is true for someone else, and you are no longer alone.
Colson Whitehead • The Nickel Boys
There are people who trick you and deliver emptiness with a smile, while others rob you of your self-respect. You need to remember who you are.
Colson Whitehead • The Nickel Boys
To you, not liking yourself is a virtue.
Notes & Highlights for The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi
No surprise, then, that sometimes I dreamed of trying to pull a mask off my face, only to realize that the mask was my face.
Viet Thanh Nguyen • The Sympathizer: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)
The black world was expanding before me, and I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white.
Ta-Nehisi Coates • Between the World and Me
being alone isn’t what makes you feel lonely. Loneliness is having other people and society and community around you, and having a deep sense of being excluded from them. To feel lonely, we need other people.
Notes & Highlights for The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi
You’re forced to realize your identity was a choice, and then to choose another. But you know this next strategy will never have the same passion as the one you’d chosen as a child. Now you’re especially aware that it’s a choice. And you know it, too, will likely fade.