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“All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story. That story is ever changing. Over the course of our lives, we may encounter unimaginable difficulties. Our concerns and desires may shift. But whatever happens, we want to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties. This is why the betrayals of body and mind that threaten to erase our character and memory remain among our most awful tortures. The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one’s life—to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.”
― Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
― Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
“But I did learn from Leonardo how a desire to marvel about the world that we encounter each day can make each moment of our lives richer.”
― Leonardo da Vinci
― Leonardo da Vinci
“Look longer at the picture. It vibrates with Leonardo’s understanding that no moment is discrete, self-contained, frozen, delineated, just as no boundary in nature is sharply delineated. As with the river that Leonardo described, each moment is part of what just passed and what is about to come. This is one of the essences of Leonardo’s art: from the Adoration of the Magi to Lady with an Ermine to The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa, each moment is not distinct but instead contains connections to a narrative.”
― Leonardo Da Vinci
― Leonardo Da Vinci
“We are all migrants through time.”
― Exit West
― Exit West
“There have been, of course, many other insatiable polymaths, and even the Renaissance produced other Renaissance Men. But none painted the Mona Lisa, much less did so at the same time as producing unsurpassed anatomy drawings based on multiple dissections, coming up with schemes to divert rivers, explaining the reflection of light from the earth to the moon, opening the still-beating heart of a butchered pig to show how ventricles work, designing musical instruments, choreographing pageants, using fossils to dispute the biblical account of the deluge, and then drawing the deluge. Leonardo was a genius, but more: he was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it.”
― Leonardo Da Vinci
― Leonardo Da Vinci
Charu’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Charu’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
383 books
|
112 friends
207 books
|
322 friends
29 books
|
485 friends
57 books
|
38 friends
288 books
|
168 friends
465 books
|
383 friends
272 books
|
261 friends
164 books
|
46 friends
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