“Whereas individual people can become dislocated by misfortunes in any society, only a free-market society produces mass dislocation as part of its normal functioning, even during periods of prosperity.”
― The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
― The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
“I tell you, when you stop doing things out of hope and the desire for continuity, all you do along with it stops. You will stay afloat.”
― Mind Is a Myth: Disquieting Conversations with the Man Called U.G.
― Mind Is a Myth: Disquieting Conversations with the Man Called U.G.
“By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity – or art, sex, humour, or religion – to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place just theories, messages and formal tropes; stop hearing the music and hear only tonalities and harmonic shifts; stop seeing the person and see only mechanisms – all because of the plane of attention. More than that, when such a state of affairs comes about, you are no longer aware that there is a problem at all. For you do not see what it is you cannot see.”
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World
― The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World
“Meditation is nothing but a way to learn how to do a thing totally—once you have learned, make your whole life a meditation; forget all about meditations, let the life be the only law, let the life be the only meditation. And then time disappears.”
― Fear: Understanding and Accepting the Insecurities of Life
― Fear: Understanding and Accepting the Insecurities of Life
“I used the f-word. I said, ‘Fuck your statistics.’” “Good for you,” I offered. “That probably helped extend your life.”
― The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
― The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture
Manoj’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Manoj’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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