Books

Reality spilled out into the alley like water from an overfilled bowl—as sound, as smell, as image, as plea, as response.

I stroll picturesque stream-flanked ippon-uras and watch kids walk before me in zigzaggy lines and think about how adults are so point-to-point specific, but these children try their hardest to stretch out their walks home, ducking into little nooks in the entryways of houses and behind stone walls, poking one another, tugging on tree branches,

Reading, he told me, creates a “unique form of consciousness…. While we’re reading, we’re directing attention outward toward the words on the page and, at the same time, enormous amounts of attention is going inward as we imagine and mentally simulate.” It’s different from if you just close your eyes and try to imagine something off the top of your

Toxically shamed people tend to become more and more stagnant as life goes on. They live in a guarded, secretive and defensive way. They try to be more than human (perfect and controlling) or less than human (losing interest in life or stagnated in some addictive behavior).