el

“Such was his level of charm that it was hard to be disgusted by it: Nick expected a door to open and it did; he expected to be adored and he was. Before Nick, I had been eating at the same three restaurants and drinking at the same two bars for years because it spared me the exhaustion of walking into a new place and convincing them I belonged and they should treat me kindly, of greeting clerks and waitpersons in my PhD voice, dropping the name of the university when necessary, generously overtipping. It was revelation to move through the world with Nick, to see how little attention a white man needed to devote to that kind of performance, how much of his worry about how other people saw him could be consumed by the frivolous, how easy it was for me to be assumed respectable merely by association.”
― Danielle Evans, The Office of Historical Corrections: A Novella and Stories

“Soka Gakkai positions are not positions of prestige but of responsibility. The most important duty leaders have is to devote themselves to serving the members and fully discharging their responsibilities for kosen-rufu. Consequently, the more responsibility the position entails, the more resolute the person’s inner determination must be to put aside interests of “self” and work tirelessly for the Law, for kosen-rufu and for the members.”
― Daisaku Ikeda, The New Human Revolution - Volume 2

“Unsupervised reading is a blessing for a certain kind of child”
― Victor LaValle, The Changeling

“Becoming the master of one’s mind means having a sound compass in life and the bright beacon of faith. We must not be mastered by ordinary people’s inconstant, weak and ever-changing minds of delusion. To master our minds, we must guide them in the right direction. In that sense, the true master of the mind is the Law and the teachings of the Buddha. Shakyamuni vowed to make the Law to which he had become enlightened the master of his mind, and he took pride in living true to that vow. This is the way of life of “taking refuge in the Law” that Shakyamuni emphasized in his final injunction to his disciples before he died.5”
― Daisaku Ikeda, On Attaining Buddhahood in This Lifetime: Commentaries on the Writings of Nichiren