“I wanted to show how humans can have ugly feelings that they might prefer not to acknowledge; how we’re all caught up in our own problems and limited by our own life experience,” she says. “To judge somebody else, to declare them substandard, to conclude that their misfortunes are due to inherent character flaws, can be a way of boosting our own self-esteem, because it must follow that our comparative success or happiness is not mere luck or chance, but the reward for superior morals or talent.”
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―
“We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean and the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that is where all the contradictions flow together.”
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“Travel far enough, you meet yourself.”
― Cloud Atlas
― Cloud Atlas
“Empathy comes from the Greek empatheia - em (into) and pathos (feeling) - a penetration, a kind of travel. It suggests you enter another person's pain as you'd enter another country, through immigration and customs, border crossing by way of query: What grows where you are? What are the laws? What animals graze there?”
― The Empathy Exams
― The Empathy Exams
Literary Disco
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A podcast all about books. Hosted by Tod Goldberg, Julia Pistell, and Rider Strong. Old books, new books, and book-related games. Occasionally, a gues ...more
Alexa’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Alexa’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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