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 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.”
― How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
― How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
“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
“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
“Extrapolating this into the realm of strangers, I worry that if we let our real-life interactions be corralled by our filter bubbles and branded identities, we are also running the risk of never being surprised, challenged, or changed—never seeing anything outside of ourselves, including our own privilege.”
― How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
― How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
“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
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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