Yhel Empit

“To stand apart is to take the view of the outsider without leaving, always oriented toward what it is you would have left. It means not fleeing your enemy, but knowing your enemy, which turns out not to be the world—contemptus mundi—but the channels through which you encounter it day to day. It also means giving yourself the critical break that media cycles and narratives will not, allowing yourself to believe in another world while living in this one. Unlike the libertarian blank slate that appeals to outer space, or even the communes that sought to break with historical time, this “other world” is not a rejection of the one we live in. Rather, it is a perfect image of this world when justice has been realized with and for everyone and everything that is already here. To stand apart is to look at the world (now) from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all of the hope and sorrowful contemplation that this entails.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“I'm shy, and while I was mildly concerned about what people might think of me when I began dining alone, I was more concerned about what I might think of me if I didn't try. I didn't want to be someone who experienced less of a city, less of life, because I was afraid. So I went.”
― Stephanie Rosenbloom, Alone Time: Four Seasons, Four Cities, and the Pleasures of Solitude

“It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics.”
― Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy

“He said our lives mean nothing except as a cycle of regeneration, that we are incomprehensibly brief sparks, just as the animals are, that we are no more important than they are, no more worthy of life than any living creature. That in our self-importance, in our search for meaning, we have forgotten how to share the planet that gave us life.”
― Charlotte McConaghy, Migrations