between the world and the self
Of course, I said, reaching for the bottle of scotch. Like me, it was half empty and half full.
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
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
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
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)
He had the image of his relationship to Esen being a thin strip of metal that Ouyang was deliberately bending back and forth. Each time it bent, it hurt. Maybe it wouldn’t hurt after it finally snapped, but Ouyang couldn’t make himself believe it.
Shelley Parker-Chan • She Who Became the Sun (The Radiant Emperor Duology Book 1)
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
And I saw that what divided me from the world was not anything intrinsic to us but the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named us matters more than anything we could ever actually do.
Ta-Nehisi Coates • Between the World and Me
I am not the center of the world. Our world is a globe, not a map that has been cut out on a plane.