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Bill Hayes
“I don’t so much fear death as I do wasting life.” Oliver Sacks”
Bill Hayes, Insomniac City: New York, Oliver, and Me

Yaa Gyasi
“Whenever I listened to his friends speak about issues like prison reform, climate change, the opioid epidemic, in the simultaneously intelligent but utterly vacuous way of people who think it's important simply to weigh in, to have an opinion, I would bristle. I would think, What is the point of all of this talk? What problems do we solve by identifying problems, circling them?”
Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

Han Yujoo
“Every beautiful thing cracks and shatters and collapses and crumples and bleeds. If not now, it will eventually.”
Han Yujoo, The Impossible Fairy Tale

Yaa Gyasi
“Mice don’t seek danger, not the way we do. They, like everything else on this planet, are subject to the whims of humans. My whims involved tests that could greatly advance our understanding of the brain, and my desire to understand the brain superseded every other desire I had. I understood that the same thing that made humans great—our recklessness and creativity and curiosity—was also the thing that hampered the lives of everything around us. Because we were the animal daring enough to take boats out to sea, even when we thought the world was flat and that our boats would fall off the edge, we discovered new land, different people, roundness. The cost of this discovery was the destruction of that new land, those different people. Without us oceans wouldn’t be turning to acid, frogs and bats and bees and reefs wouldn’t be heading for extinction. Without me, the limping mouse wouldn’t limp; he would never have succumbed to addiction.”
Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

Yaa Gyasi
“It took me many years to realize that it’s hard to live in this world. I don’t mean the mechanics of living, because for most of us, our hearts will beat, our lungs will take in oxygen, without us doing anything at all to tell them to. For most of us, mechanically, physically, it’s harder to die than it is to live. But still we try to die. We drive too fast down winding roads, we have sex with strangers without wearing protection, we drink, we use drugs. We try to squeeze a little more life out of our lives. It’s natural to want to do that. But to be alive in the world, every day, as we are given more and more and more, as the nature of “what we can handle” changes and our methods for how we handle it change, too, that’s something of a miracle.”
Yaa Gyasi, Transcendent Kingdom

989474 Sumaiyya’s Book Club — 164 members — last activity Jun 22, 2026 07:53AM
A space where we discuss Middle Eastern, South Asian, Muslim and immigrant stories. Founded by @sumaiyya.books. JULY PICK: If They Come For Us by Fat ...more
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