Bruce

“instead to focus on doing a few things that count.”
― Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals

“If Pepper was not mistaken, Carney’s father was the first person to take him there—Big Mike was a proponent of a proper meal before a robbery. Breaking a guy’s leg or casing a warehouse didn’t necessarily require nutritional prep, but a robbery called for a hearty sit-down, without fail. Pepper, reluctant to offer praise on anything or anybody, privately assessed that it was the best chicken he’d ever tasted.”
― Colson Whitehead, Crook Manifesto

“times in our marriage I loathed him. I saw, with a kind of dull disc of dread in my chest, that with his pleasant distance, his mild expressions, he was unavailable. But worse. Because beneath his height of pleasantness there lurked a juvenile crabbiness, a scowl that flickered across his soul, a pudgy little boy with his lower lip thrust forward who blamed this person and that person—he blamed me, I felt this often; he was blaming me for something that had nothing to do with our present lives, and he blamed me even as he called me “Sweetheart,” making my coffee—back then he never drank coffee but he made me a cup each morning—setting it down before me martyr-like.”
― Elizabeth Strout, Oh William!

“Personality change may sound like an eerie, out-of-body experience—and as the quantum change stories show, it can be. But the science behind it is remarkably simple: You just have to remember to act how you’d like to be, consistently. And”
― Olga Khazan, Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change