“You will never find one answer to what makes you happy. There are many answers, and they change based on your current state. People need to relax, but if all you do is sit on the beach, it gets old. People find meaning in work, but if all you do is work, it gets exhausting. People benefit from exercise, but if all you do is exercise, it gets unhealthy. Happiness will always be fleeting because your needs change over time. The question is: what do you need right now?”
James Clear
“It wasn’t about the money. I wanted to stay as busy as possible. I wanted to work my body as hard as it could go so there was no time to feel sorry for myself, to bind myself to a routine that would keep me grounded in the last remaining months before Peter and I left Eugene for good. Maybe I was punishing myself for my failures as a caretaker, or maybe I was just afraid of what would happen if I slowed down.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 193)
“Most nights, after an early dinner we’d return to our hotel rooms and I’d crumple onto the bed and sleep for fourteen to fifteen hours. Grief, like depression, made it hard to accomplish even the simplest of tasks. The country felt wasted on us. We were numb to all spectacle and feeling, quietly miserable and completely clueless as to how to help each other. All I wanted to do was go home. I longed to hide in my bedroom and dissociate with the comforts of my PlayStation and its soothing farming simulation games, not wake up at six a.m. to take a van tour of another pagoda and marketplace while my father bartered for half an hour over the equivalent of a couple of USD.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 172)
“Some restaurants keep a photo of the local reviewer in the kitchen. The thinking is that if someone notices she’s in the building, everyone can up their game. And some musicians wait eagerly for A&R person to be in the crowd. If they really kill it tonight, a record deal might ensue. The most resilient approach, of course, is to act as if. What if this is your most important post, or your last one? What if the email you’re sending is going to be forwarded to your boss? What if… We can’t know for sure. But we can act as if it’s going to happen.”
Seth Godin
“We figured that maybe if we were busy taking in a place neither of us had ever been, we could manage to forget, just for a moment, how much our lives had fallen apart.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 171)
“It was comforting to hold her work in my hands, to envision my mother prior to pain and suffering, relaxing with a paintbrush in my hand, surrounded by close friends. I wondered if making art had been therapeutic for her, helped her navigate the existential dread that came with Eunmi’s death. I wondered if the late bloom of her creative interests had shed light on my own artistic impulses. If my own creativity had come from her in the first place. If in another life, if circumstances had been different, she might have been an artist, too.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 168)
“False happiness [is] even worse than real sadness, because at least in that sadness there is a reality. If you are sad—but truly and sincerely sad—that sadness will enrich you. It gives you a depth, an insight. It makes you aware of life and its infinite possibilities and of the limits of the human mind, the smallness of human consciousness encountering the infinity all around, the fragile life always surrounded by death. When you are really sad you become aware of all these things. You become aware that life is not just life—it is death too.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 217)
“When one person collapses [from grief], the other instinctively shoulders their weight.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 153)
“It was difficult to write about someone I felt I knew so well. The words were unwieldy, engorged with pretension. I wanted to uncover something special about her that only I could reveal. That she was so much more than a housewife, than a mother. That she was her own spectacular individual. Perhaps I was still sanctimoniously belittling the two roles she was ultimately most proud of, unable to accept that the same degree of fulfillment may await those who wish to nurture and love as those who seek to earn and create. Her art was the love that beat on in her loved ones, a contribution to the world that could be just as monumental as a song or a book. There could not be one without the other. Maybe I was just terrified that I might be the closest thing she had to leaving a piece of herself behind.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 159)
“Great song is possible, great richness is possible, but one has to start exploring. And the best way to explore the song of one’s life is to love; that is the very methodology. Just as logic is the methodology of science, love is the methodology of the spirit. Just as logic makes you capable of going deeper and deeper into matter, love makes you capable of going deeper and deeper into consciousness. And the deeper you go, the deeper songs are released. When one has reached the very core of one’s being, the whole of life becomes a celebration, an utter celebration.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 215)
“If life is fair, and it will be, it will serve you immeasurable beauties, joys and pleasures—you will feel at times that you do not have the capacity to take them in. You will. Our hearts they are boundless. If life is fair, and it will be, it will bring you huge, merciless sorrows. Devastations of your boundless heart. I wish for you the grace to persevere and accept them across time, for that is the only way these kinds of things can be taken in. A wise and articulate student once told me that struggle is vital. For all of the mundane days in between joy and sorrow? Persevere.”
Dan Weiss | Read Matt’s Blog on this Quote ➜
“The point of philosophy is to challenge you, to make you uncomfortable. It’s to fix the illnesses of the soul, of the mind. Even though there are passages of Meditations that are soothing and reassuring, a lot of them are jarring, a lot of them are uncomfortable or make you think a lot, and a lot of them you might instinctively disagree with. But that’s the point of philosophy: it’s not supposed to be your instructor, it’s supposed to be a kind of medicine.”
Ryan Holiday
“What’s the point of success if it doesn’t free you up to do the right thing? If your money doesn’t give you the security to tell a jerk or a racist to go to hell, how much is it actually worth? The Stoics said that money, like power, was neither good nor bad—that having it was not itself virtuous—but they also believed it was better to have than not, especially if it facilitated being able to act on your virtues”
Ryan Holiday
“We fell asleep in my childhood bed. We still hadn’t had sex since we got married and as I drifted off, I wondered how I ever could. I couldn’t fathom joy or pleasure or losing myself in a moment ever again. Maybe because it felt wrong, like a betrayal. If I really loved her, I had no right to feel those things again.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 153)
“If we always had something to look forward to, we could trick this disease. Not now, cancer, there’s a wedding! And then a tasting in Napa! Then an anniversary, a birthday. Come back when we’re not so busy.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 145)
“If I imagine what a miserable working week would be (within the context of my existing business), it would be Zoom calls all day, no creative work, strict deadlines from sponsors, and the feeling that I’m making videos that I don’t actually think are useful just for the sake of an algorithm or a sponsor. I’m also staying in the house all day, not doing any exercise, eating unhealthy takeaway food, and not seeing any friends. Okay great, I’ve just defined what my nightmare work week would look like. So now I can just make sure to avoid having work days that look like that.”
Ali Abdaal
“The producer of old age is habit: the deathly process of doing the same thing in the same way at the same hour day after day, first from carelessness, then from inclination, at last from cowardice or inertia. Habit is necessary; but it is the habit of having careless habits, of turning a trail into a rut, that must be incessantly fought against if one is to remain alive… one can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”
Edith Wharton
“I talked about how love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor. How I felt it most when he drove up to New York after work at three in the morning just to hold me in a warehouse in Brooklyn after I’d discovered my mother was sick. The many times these months he’d flown three thousand miles whenever I needed him. While he listened patiently through the five calls a day I’d been making since June.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 143)
“I loved that she did not fear god. I loved that she believed in reincarnation, the idea that after all this she could start anew. When I asked her what she’d want to come back as, she always told me she’d like to return as a tree. It was a strange and comforting answer, that rather than something grand and heroic, my mother preferred to return to life as something humble and still.”
Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart (Page 135)
“In the same way that a vaccine exposes our body to a manageable amount of the virus or the disease, teaching it how to fight the illness, talking to ourselves (or our children) about what is going to happen in advance of it happening helps us deal with it. It removes the surprise, it removes the suddenness of it. The last thing you want to do is to face anything—a virus or a trip to the grocery store with a tired kid—defenseless. Especially when there are defenses available.”
Ryan Holiday