Nikhil Sethi

“I want to be happy," says dad. "I want to be interested and challenged by whatever verb I elect to noun in any given moment of my life. If I am healthy, my family's healthy, and I am of sound enough mind to sustain curiosity around my work, then I'm blessed.”
― Mary H.K. Choi, Permanent Record

“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.”
― Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

“The notion of my future suddenly snapped into focus: it didn't exist yet. I was making it, standing there, breathing, fixing the air around my body with stillness, trying to capture something—a thought, I guess—as though such a thing were possible, as though I believed in the delusion described in those paintings—that time could be contained, held captive.”
― Ottessa Moshfegh, My Year of Rest and Relaxation

“I looked over at my neighbor, the song sparrow, and thought about how just a few years ago, I wouldn’t have known its name, might not have even known it was a sparrow, might not have even seen it at all. How lonely that world seemed in comparison to this one! But the sparrow and I were no longer strangers. It was no stretch of the imagination, nor even of science, to think that we were related. We were both from the same place (Earth), made of the same stuff. And most important, we were both alive.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy