Jolyon Cheung

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Hanya Yanagihara
“Friendship was witnessing another’s slow drip of miseries, and long bouts of boredom, and occasional triumphs. It was feeling honored by the privilege of getting to be present for another person’s most dismal moments, and knowing that you could be dismal around him in return.”
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara
“Wasn’t friendship its own miracle, the finding of another person who made the entire lonely world seem somehow less lonely?”
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

Hanya Yanagihara
“Relationships never provide you with everything. They provide you with some things. You take all you want from a person - sexual chemistry, let's say, or good conversation, or financial support, or intellectual compatibility, or niceness, or loyalty - and you get to pick three of them.”
Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life

Olivia Laing
“Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.”
Olivia Laing, The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone

Teju Cole
“Each person must, on some level, take himself as the calibration point for normalcy, must assume that the room of his own mind is not, cannot be, entirely opaque to him. Perhaps this is what we mean by sanity: that, whatever our self-admitted eccentricities might be, we are not the villains of our own stories. In fact, it is quite the contrary: we play, and only play, the hero, and in the swirl of other people’s stories, insofar as those stories concern us at all, we are never less than heroic. Who, in the age of television, hasn’t stood in front of a mirror and imagined his life as a show that is already perhaps being watched by multitudes? Who has not, with this consideration in mind, brought something performative into his everyday life? We have the ability to do both good and evil, and more often than not, we choose the good. When we don’t, neither we nor our imagined audience is troubled, because we are able to articulate ourselves to ourselves, and because we have through our other decisions, merited their sympathy. They are ready to believe the best about us, and not without good reason.”
Teju Cole, Open City

year in books
Basalt
2,043 books | 17 friends

Matteo ...
4,755 books | 349 friends

David
806 books | 2,846 friends

Sreddy
761 books | 47 friends

Gloria
686 books | 38 friends


Alexand...
576 books | 445 friends

storyti...
1,313 books | 414 friends

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