Jane Ryder

“Those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.”
― Aldous Huxley, Eyeless in Gaza

“Plum's own romantic history so far had been pretty limited, with minimal drama. It was one area where she felt comfortable lagging behind her peers. But she prided herself on her powerful philosophical insights into other people's relationships.”
― Lev Grossman, The Magician's Land

“This has been the point of much of this book. The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it. It is designed, in a certain sense, to be controlled by that input. And a key cog in the machinery of control is the feelings that arise in response to the input. If you interact with those feelings via tanha—via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings—you will continue to be controlled by the world around you. But if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behavior can be defied, and you can get closer to the unconditioned.”
― Robert Wright, Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment

“and what if I travel
when all this rain passes
and park outside the fence
of our homestead
and breathe in the universe”
― Samantha Rae Lazar, Reaching Marrakesh