When a student gets it, when it first breaks across his face, it’s so fucking beautiful, he told me. I nodded, moved, though I’d never taught anyone a single thing. What do you teach, I asked him. Rollerblading, he explained.
“I touched the frame of the painting. And then I placed my whole palm on the dry, rumbling surface of the canvas, simply to prove to myself that there was no god stalking my soul. Time was not immemorial. Things were just things.”
― My Year of Rest and Relaxation
― My Year of Rest and Relaxation
“in my frenzied state of despair, I understood: there was stability in living in the past.”
― My Year of Rest and Relaxation
― My Year of Rest and Relaxation
“I can't burden them with my shit. Mom will absorb it all as a personal failing. Neither of them has the tools to deal with this. I'll have to figure it out on my own.”
― Permanent Record
― Permanent Record
“Life offers up these moments of joy despite everything,”
― Normal People
― Normal People
“Sometimes I would worry about my internet habits and force myself awy from the computer, to read a magazine or book. Contemporary literature offered no respite: I would find the prose cluttered with data points, tenuous historical connections, detail so finely tuned it could have only been extracted from a feverish night of search-engine queries. Aphorisms were in; authors were wired. I would pick up books that had been heavily documented on social media, only to find that the books themselves had a curatorial affect: beautiful descriptions of little substance, arranged in elegant vignettes—gestural text, the equivalent of a rumpled linen bedsheet or a bunch of dahlias placed just so. Oh, I would think, turning the page. This author is addicted to the internet, too.”
― Uncanny Valley
― Uncanny Valley
Nikhil’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Nikhil’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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