Georgia Ko

“What is most truly valuable is often underrated.”
― Aesop, Aesop's Fables

“Don't give yourself to negligence,
Don't devote yourself to sensual pleasure,
Vigilant and absorbed in meditation
One attains abundant happiness.”
― Gautama Buddha, The Dhammapada

“On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I'd later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“Sensual craving gives rise to grief;
Sensual craving gives rise to fear.
For someone released from sensual craving
There is no grief;
And from where would be fear?”
― Gautama Buddha, The Dhammapada