“One need not have a crowd around oneself. A few deep, intimate relationships are enough; they are really fulfilling. In fact, because people don’t have intimate relationships, they have many relationships to substitute. But there is not substitution for real intimacy. You can have one thousand friends—that will not make for one real one. But that’s what people are doing: They think that quantity can become a substitute for quality. It never does. It cannot.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 282)
“Meditation has nothing to do with time or place. Rather, it has something to do with you, your inner space. So whenever you are free of the day-to-day routine, relax and allow it to happen. It can happen any place, any time, because it is nontemporal and nonspatial.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 281)
“It almost always happens that lovers become childlike—because love accepts you. It makes no demands on you. Love does not say, ‘Be this, be that.’ Love simply says, ‘Be yourself. You are good as you are. You are beautiful as you are.’ Love accepts you. Suddenly you start dropping your ideals, ‘shoulds,’ personalities. You drop your old skin, and again you become a child. Love makes people young.'”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 279)
“The storm may be powerful, but no storm is endless. Giving space to what you feel is always valuable because it is an essential part of healing and letting go, but if you let it take control then it will be too easy to fall into past patterns. Being with it is better than becoming it. There is a subtle space you should become more familiar with, the space where reclaiming your power is truly possible – the space where you can feel a fire burning within you without giving it more fuel.”
Yung Pueblo
“To reach the source, you have to swim against the current. Only trash swims downstream.”
Haruki Murakami, Novelist as a Vocation
“While many of us have encountered serious trauma and some people have done us incredible harm, if we want to repair and heal the imprints that burden our subconscious and skew our perception, we need to embrace the hard work of becoming our own hero. There is no way around it. When it comes to you and the inner workings of your mind, no one has the power or authority to save you the way you can save yourself. All therapists, meditation teachers, counselors, and coaches can do is guide you to reclaim your own power. A guide is not a savior. A guide is simply the person who can show you how to walk the right path so that you can finally live without having to carry so many mental burdens.”
Yung Pueblo
“In a bad 1950s science fiction movie, you might see flying jetpacks, invisibility cloaks and ray guns. What we got instead is a device that fits in our pocket. It allows us to connect to more than a billion people. It knows where we are and where we’re going. It has all of our contacts, the sum total of all published knowledge, an artificially intelligent computer that can understand and speak in our language, one of the best cameras ever developed, a video camera with editor, a universal translator and a system that can measure our heart rate. We can look up real time pricing and inventory data, listen to trained actors read us audiobooks and identify any song, any plant or any bird. We can see the reviews from our community of nearby restaurants or even the reputation of a doctor or lawyer. It can track the location of our loved ones and call us a chauffeured vehicle at the touch of a button. And of course, we use it to have arguments. And to watch very short stupid videos.”
Seth Godin
“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, air-less—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
C. S. Lewis
“The problem with smart people is they can come up with a good reason for not doing anything. They are smart enough to find the cracks, to foresee the challenges, and to talk themselves out of the idea. They are experts at justifying their lack of courage or lack of action with an intelligent excuse.
But there will always be reasons to not do something, and this is particularly true of anything worth doing. We value those moments in which we overcame challenge, not those in which we avoided it. Ultimately, action is a choice. The choice to emphasize the reasons for doing it despite the reasons you have for avoiding it.”
James Clear
“There can be no liberation when our most intimate relationships are built on—and really inflected by—deception, abuse, misdirection, antiblackness, patriarchy, and bald-faced lies.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 239)
“We all broken. Some broken folk do whatever they can not to break other folk. If we’re gone be broken, I wonder if we can be those kind of broken folk from now on. I think it’s possible to be broken and ask for help without breaking other people.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 228)
“My body knew that my weight, the exact number, became an emotional, psychological, and spiritual destination a long time ago. I knew, and worried, about how much I weight and exactly how much money I had every day of my life since I was eleven years old. The weight reminded me of how much I’d eaten, how much I’d starved, how much I’d exercised, and how much I sat still yesterday. My body knew I was no more liberated or free when I was 159 pounds with 2 percent body fat that I was at 319 pounds with achy joints. I loved the rush of pushing my body beyond places it never wanted to go, but I was addicted to controlling the number on that scale. Controlling that number on the scale, more than writing a story or essay or feeling loved or making money or having sex, made me feel less gross, and most abundant. Losing weight helped me forget.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 207)
“My job as a teacher was to help them breathe with excellence and discipline in the classroom. The ones that love you, they become what you model. Don’t forget that. Help them breathe by modeling responsible love in the classroom every single day. The most important thing a teacher can do is give their students permission to be loving and excellent.”
Kiese Laymon’s mom, Heavy (Page 180)
“The constant awareness that one should not start clinging to anything makes life blissful. One enjoys tremendously whatever is available. It is always more than one can enjoy, and it is always available. But the mind is too attached to things—we become blind to the celebration that is always available.”
Osho, Everyday Osho (Page 261)
“In class, I only spoke when I could be an articulate defender of black people. I didn’t use the classroom to ask questions. I didn’t use the classroom to make ungrounded claims. There was too much at stake to ask questions, to be dumb, to be a curious student, in front of a room of white folk who assumed all black folk were intellectually less than. For the first time in my life, the classroom scared me. And when I was scared, I ran to cakes, because cakes felt safe, private, and celebratory. Cakes never fought back.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 123)
“I asked you if I could take some books from the house to have in my dorm room. You reached up, pulled on my neck, and kissed me on the top of the head. I pulled away. ‘Maybe the books will protect you,’ you said. ‘Take all the books you need. And don’t fight when you’re angry. Think when you’re angry. Write when you’re angry. Read when you’re angry. Don’t let those people shoot you out of the sky while I’m gone.’ I rolled my eyes and sucked hard on my teeth as you walked to the end of the line. ‘Don’t be good,’ you said across the space between us. ‘Be perfect. Be fantastic.'”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 119)
“The rest of my teachers maybe did the best they could, but they just needed a lot of help making their best better. There were so many things we needed in those classrooms, in our city, in our state, in our country that our teachers could have provided if they would have gone home and really done their homework. They never once said the words: ‘economic inequality,’ ‘housing discrimination,’ ‘sexual violence,’ ‘mass incarceration,’ ‘homophobia,’ ’empire,’ ‘mass eviction,’ ‘post traumatic stress disorder,’ ‘white supremacy,’ ‘patriarchy,’ ‘neo-confederacy,’ ‘mental health,’ or ‘parental abuse,’ yet every student and teacher at that school lived in a world shaped by those words.”
Kiese Laymon, Heavy (Page 114)
“You hurting yourself by trying to let folk know they hurt you. God gives us five sense for a reason. You hear me? Use them. Stop hunting for distractions. Stop taking your own legs out. It’s enough mess out there trying to beat us down without you helping.”
Kiese Laymon’s Grandmother, Heavy (Page 114)