We expect more from technology and less from each other. What once would have seemed like ‘good service’ is now an inconvenience.
– Sherry Turkle

Oysters make pearls so they can feel better.
When a grain of sand/debris gets stuck in they bodies, they ease the pain and irritation by coating it with multiples layers of nacre, the mineral that lines the
inside of the shell and the pearl begins to form.

On the downside, there isn't a point. on the upside, there isn't a point

But I think it is also hard for us to confront human-caused climate change because the most privileged among us, the people who consume the most energy, can separate ourselves from the weather. I am certainly one such person. I am insulated from the weather by my house and its conditioned air. I eat strawberries in January. When it is raining, I can go inside. When it is dark, I can turn on lights. It is easy for me to feel like climate is mostly an outside phenomenon, whereas I am mostly an inside phenomenon.

INSULTS:

i wish people had been kinder to you so that you could be kinder to people

I can only explain it to you, I can't understand it for you.

You have the confidence of a much taller man.

You light up every room you leave.

"You aren't the dumbest person alive, but you'd better hope they don't die"

"I hope you're just having a bad day, and this isn't your real personality"

"I envy the people who have never met you"

"The more familiar two people become, the more the language they speak together departs from that of the ordinary, dictionary-defined discourse. Familiarity creates a new language, an in-house language of intimacy that carries reference to the story the two lovers are weaving together and that cannot be readily understood by others"
—Alain de Botton

“If you do not change direction, you may end up where you’re heading.” - Lao Tzu

A man visits his doctor as he’s worried about his wife who is getting acutely deaf but refuses to acknowledge it. ‘The doctor says he can’t help unless he knows how deaf she really is and suggests, when she isn’t looking, the husband stands at the opposite end of the room and asks her a question. If she doesn’t respond, to take three paces forward and ask again, and so on. When the husband gets home he finds she’s cooking. Fortuitously the kitchen is extremely large. Standing as far away as possible he asks what’s for supper. She doesn’t reply. He advances three paces and asks again. No response. He takes another three paces and leaning forward shouts in her ear. Startled, she shouts back, ‘Chicken.’ And then adds, ‘for christsakes, what’s wrong with you ? I’ve already told you three times.’ (Art Of Looking Sideways — Alan Fletcher)

Life is so short, so fragile, so mystifying. After all, how many people do we actually love in the course of a lifetime? Just a few, a tiny few. When most of them are gone, the map of your inner world changes. As my friend George Oppen once said to me about getting old: what a strange thing to happen to a little boy.”
—
Paul Auster
The Paris Review Interviews, vol. IV (New York: Picador, 2009), 328.
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It’s the sides of the mountain that sustain life, not the top.
– Robert M. Pirsig

'Perfectionism isn't a high standard, it's just a fear in disguise'