Joyce’s Reviews > The List > Status Update

Even if your life is full of people you love and care for, you have to breathe for yourself first.

Amanda: Rather than judging love by its duration, we should give up judging love at all. Love is the life force flowing through us. Love is the moment when the walls that separate us from the rest of the universe come tumbling down. And we stand there, naked and afraid, but not alone. ... it's proof that we are part of something larger and more important than ourselves.

the List becomes a tool for understanding yourself

that half-bent ear is a manifestation of wildness bested by domesticity; it's the dog carrying a reminder of how it ended up as a friend in the circle of the campfire and not a beast lurking in the dark.

...my favorite dog characteristic, the upright-and-then-floppy ear, is a sort of accident of breeding. The part of the ear that stands straight up is a vestige of the canine's wild, wolfish past; the part that flops down so adorably is actually the side effect of an adrenal gland defect that essentially results in fewer stem cells reaching some areas of the ear, therefore deforming their growth.

Many non-Asian people in America like to think that all the people of the East are exceptionally spiritual ... If anything, we are exceptionally practical.

The more I delve into it, the more the List starts to feel like a diversionary tactic of late-stage capitalism, a hope bubble to keep us in thrall to a worn-out system.

we're all made up of stardust because that is one of my favorite pop-science thoughts. ... it's a beautiful notion, but it also means that butt implants are stardust and nuclear arms are stardust and Flamin' Hot Cheetos are stardust, too. Every single bag of them.

The List makes you face outward, which is never where the relationship is going to be. The process of looking for love is really a relationship with yourself.

People tend to cling to anything that claims to mediate between desire and chaos, especially if it has just a few easy-to-follow rules. That's why those one-ingredient diets become such runaway hits ...