Stephanie Barko

“The results of five experiments involving more than a thousand participants showed that reading literary fiction improves our ability to detect and understand other people's emotions. But it can't be any sort of fiction. The researchers distinguished between "popular fiction" (where the author leads you by the hand as a reader) and "literary fiction" (in which you must find your own way and fill in the gaps). Instead of being told why a certain character behaves as they do, you have to figure it out yourself. That way, the book becomes not just a simulation of a social experience, it is a social experience.”
― Meik Wiking, The Little Book of Lykke: The Danish Search for the World's Happiest People

“Vain people can't bear to be crossed. They are the center of their world, and if circumstances don't allow the world to meet their needs, then the circumstances need to be changed. Their actions appear proportionate to them because any situation where their needs aren't being met is an affront.”
― Judith Flanders, A Bed of Scorpions

“Saturday, my thirty-sixth birthday, passed in a fog. Sundays would have normally found me attending church services, but I spent my first Sunday in Dallas, sitting on the edge of a bed in a nondescript motel room, in a daze — with a .45, not a Bible, by my side.”
― John Oliver Green

“There is always light.
Only if we are brave enough to see it.
There is always light.
Only if we are brave enough to be it.”
― Amanda Gorman