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“choose the story you will stand in. How to choose? What will you believe, given how easily reason, logic, and evidence are conscripted to the service of a story? Here is an alternative: Choose the story that best embodies who you really are, who you wish to be, and who you are in fact becoming. Behind the fog of helplessness of the question “Will we make it?” is a gateway to our power to choose and to create. Because written on its threshold is another question, the real question: “Who am I?” The despair is only as valid as the story beneath it that generates what we believe possible. The story beneath it is the Story of Self. So who are you? Are you a discrete and separate individual in a world of other? Or are you the totality of all relationships, converging at a particular locus of attention? Get over the fantasy that you can answer this question by finding proof. Reading one more book on psi phenomena or past-life regression won’t satisfy your inner skeptic. No amount of evidence will be enough. You are just going to have to choose, without proof. Who are you?”
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“Do all that you can, with all that you have, in the time that you have, in the place where you are. —Nkosi Johnson”
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“When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That's the message he is sending.”
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“you could not love what you fully understood. Love, she maintained, was a process; not a state.”
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“The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass, and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers. She looked back up over her forehead at the grey-black wall towering behind her, and wondered if the castle had ever been attacked on days like this. Did the sky seem so limitless, the waters of the straits so fresh and clean, the flowers so bright and fragrant, when men fought and screamed, hacked and staggered and fell and watched their blood mat the grass? Mists and dusk, rain and lowering cloud seemed the better background; clothes to cover the shame of battle.”
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John Natoli’s 2025 Year in Books
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