Philip

“I feel certain of this: I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I weren’t a reader. I don’t just mean because I enjoy reading or spend so much time with my books. I mean that from an early age, and without consciously intending to, the ideas I got from books formed the interior architecture of my mind.”
― Anne Bogel, I'd Rather Be Reading: The Delights and Dilemmas of the Reading Life

“Persons tend to think and feel exclusively in one mode or the other and in doing so tend to misunderstand and underestimate what the other mode is all about. But no one is willing to give up the truth as he sees it, and as far as I know, no one now living has any real reconciliation of these truths or modes.”
― Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

“People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn. But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film. ·”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“I want you to be on the lookout for people who talk with unerring conviction and authority about what others should do. Especially about what others should do. These are the people who always seem to lead us into some kind of trouble.”
― Omar Saif Ghobash, Letters to a Young Muslim