Sean

“In 1998, the New York Times reported that “in the [annual UCLA] survey taken at the start of the fall semester, 74.9 percent of freshmen chose being well off as an essential goal and 40.8 percent chose developing a philosophy. In 1968, the numbers were reversed, with 40.8 percent selecting financial security and 82.5 percent citing the importance of developing a philosophy.”
― Todd May, A Significant Life: Human Meaning in a Silent Universe

“It cheers me to imagine that the air that once powered me could power others, to believe that the breath that enables me to engrave these words could one day flow through someone else’s body. I do not delude myself into thinking that this would be a way for me to live again, because I am not that air, I am the pattern that it assumed, temporarily. The pattern that is me, the patterns that are the entire world in which I live, would be gone.”
― Ted Chiang, Exhalation

“But there’s stress and stress, the attenuating wear and tear of overwork versus the exhausting psychic fray of living the wrong life.”
― Olivia Laing, Everybody: A Book about Freedom

“Light as beautiful as this was worth everything, she thought—or damn near everything. Outside the twisted bones and scarred flesh of one’s own body, life wasn’t shit at all.”
― Michel Faber, Under the Skin