Eraser In My Head

When I read a quote or passage in a book that makes me pause, I use the time to jot down the page number. When I finish the book, I like to go back and use the page numbers to type all of them up. Below are quotes from a handful of the books I’ve read. Sometimes if I’m writing and need an inspiring kick in the pants, I come wade through this page for a while.

This list will be updated with new books I read. If you’d like to browse them by the book, individual links are available below.

On Such a Full Sea
All the Light We Cannot See
Answer Me 1988
Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World
Kokoro
The Learning Child
Norwegian Wood
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
When Breath Becomes Air
Fresh Off the Boat

—

On Such a Full Sea

Chang-rae Lee

“It couldn’t have been just Reg she had gone to search out. She had no real leads as to where he might be, or if he was even live. So why would any sane person leave our cloister for such uncertainties? He was the impetus, yes, the veritable without which, but not the whole story. One person or thing can never comprise that, no matter how much one is cherished, no matter how much one is loved. A tale, like the universe, they tell us, expands ceaselessly each time you examine it, until there’s finally no telling exactly where it begins, or ends, or where it places you now.” p. 61.

“Fan would have expected that one or two of the Girls would have long rebelled at spending a life in a room, would have begged, say, the dentist, to help them steal away, but the funny thing about this existence is that once firmly settled we occupy it with less guard than we know. We watch ourselves routinely brushing our teeth, or coloring the wall, or blowing off the burn from a steaming yarn of soup noodles, and for every moment there is a companion moment that elides onto it, a secret span that deepens the original’s stamp. We feel ever obliged by everyday charges and tasks. They conscript us more and more. We find world enough in a frame. Until at last we take our places at the wheel, or wall, or line, having somewhere forgotten that we can look up.” p. 219.

“This was the way of the mural; it reflected whatever was happening at the moment, and by reading it from the beginning, Fan could trace the looping arcs of their time and how each girl had come but also whatever was of interest or concern, becoming a more intricate map of their consciousness as it was emended and evolved.” p. 220.

—

All the Light We Cannot See

Anthony Doerr

“The brain is locked in total darkness, of course, children, says the voice. It floats in a clear liquid inside the skull, never in the light. And yet the world it constructs in the mind is full of light. It brims with color and movement. So how, children, does the brain, which lives without a spark of light, build for us a world full of light?” p. 48.

“‘Papa says curses are only stories cooked up to deter thieves. He says there are sixty-five million specimens in this place, and if you have the right teacher, each can be as interesting as the last.’” p. 52.

“Werner feels Dr. Hauptmann’s attention on him like a floodlight. He sticks the magnet to the screw’s head and holds the screw’s point to the positive terminal on the battery. When he runs the wire from the negative side of the battery to the head of the screw, both the screw and the magnet start to spin. The operation takes him no more than fifteen seconds.
Dr. Hauptmann’s mouth is partially open. His face is flushed, adrenalized. ‘What is your name, cadet?’
‘Pfennig, sir.’
‘What else can you make?’
Werner studies the parts on the table. ‘A doorbell, sir? Or a Morse beacon? An ohmmeter?’
The other boys crane their necks. Dr. Hauptmann’s lips are pink and his eyelids are improbably thin. As though he is watching Werner even when he blinks. He says, ‘Make them all.’” p. 149.

“He hears Dr. Hauptmann: A scientist’s work is determined by two things: his interests and those of his time. Everything has led to this: the death of his father; all those restless hours with Jutta listening to the crystal radio in the attic; Hans and Herribert wearing their red armbands under their shirts so Frau Elena would not see; four hundred dark, glittering nights at Schulpforta building transceivers for Dr. Hauptmann. The destruction of Frederick. Everything leading to this moment as Werner piles the haphazard Cossack equipment into the shell of the truck and sits with his back against the bench and watches the light from the burning cottage rise above the field. Bernd climbs in beside him, rifle in his lap, and neither bothers to close the back door when the Opel roars into gear.” p. 338-339.

“It was the summer when fireflies showed up in Saint-Malo, and their father was very excited, building long-handled nets for his boys and giving them jars with wire to fasten over the tops, and Etienne and Henri raced through the tall grass as the fireflies floated away from them, illuming on and off, always seeming to rise just beyond their reach, as if the earth were smoldering and these were sparks that their footfalls had prodded free.” p. 347-348.

“‘That’s the Staatsoper,” says Neumann Two one night. The facade of a grand building rises gracefully, pilastered and crenelated. Stately wings soar on either side, somehow both heavy and light. It strikes Werner just then as wondrously futile to build splendid buildings, to make music, to sing songs, to print huge books full of colorful birds in the face of the seismic, engulfing indifference of the world—what pretensions humans have! Why bother to make music when the silence and wind are so much larger? Why light lamps when the darkness will inevitably snuff them? When Russian prisoners are chained by threes and fours to fences while German privates tuck live grenades in their pockets and run?
Opera houses! Cities on the moon! Ridiculous. They would all do better to put their faces on the curbs and wait for the boys who come through the city dragging sledges stacked with corpses.” p. 364-365.

“Werner waits for the child to blink. Blink, he thinks, blink blink blink. Already Volkheimer is closing the closet door, though it won’t close all the way because the girl’s foot is sticking out of it, and Bernd is covering the woman on the bed with a blanket, and how could Neumann Two not have known, but of course he didn’t, because that is how things are with Neumann Two, with everybody in this unit, in this army, in this world, they do as they’re told, they get scared, they move about with only themselves in mind. Name me someone who does not.
Neumann One shoulders out, something rancid in his eyes. Neumann Two stands there with his new haircut, his fingers playing senseless trills on the stock of his rifle. “Why did they hide?” he says.
Volkheimer tucks the child’s foot gently back inside the closet. “There’s no radio here,” he says, and shuts the door. Threads of nausea reach up around Werner’s windpipe.
Outside, the street lamps shudder in a late wind. Clouds ride west over the city.
Werner climbs into the Opel, feeling as if the buildings are rearing around him, growing taller and warping. He sits with his forehead against the listening decks and is sick between his shoes.
So really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.
Bernd climbs in and pulls the door shut and the Opel comes to life, tilting as it rounds a corner, and Werner can feel the streets rising around them, whorling slowly into an engulfing spiral, into the center of which the truck will arc downward, tracing deeper and deeper all the time.” p. 368-369.

“For a failure of imagination and in the darkness, it feels as if Werner has reached bottom, as if he has been whirling deeper all this time, like the Nautilus sucked under the maelstrom, like his father descending into the pits: a one-way dive from Zollverin past Schulpforta, past the horrors of Russia and Ukraine, past the mother and daughter in Vienna, his ambition and shame becoming one and the same, to the nadir in this basement on the rim of the continent where the apparition chants nonsense—Frau Schwartzenberger walks towards him, transforming herself as she approaches from woman to girl—her hair becomes red again, her skin smooths, a seven-year-old girl presses her face up against his, and in the center of her forehead he can see a hole blacker than the blackness around him, at the bottom of which teems a dark city full of souls, ten thousand, five hundred thousand, all these faces staring up from alleys, from windows, from smoldering parks, and he hears thunder.
Lightning.
Artillery.
The girl evaporates.
The ground quakes. The organs inside his body shake. The beams groan. Then the slow trickle of dust and the shallow, defeated breaths of Volkheimer a meter away.” p. 450-451.

“We all come into existence as a single cell, smaller than a speck of dust. Much smaller. Divide. Multiply. Add and subtract. Matter changes hands, atoms flow in and out, molecules pivot, proteins stitch together, mitochondria send out their oxidative dictates; we begin as a microscopic electric swarm. The lungs the brain the heart. Forty weeks later, six trillion cells get crushed in the vise of our mother’s birth canal and we howl. Then the world starts in on us.” p. 468.

“To find the snails crawling along the rocks, these tiny wet beings straining calcium from the water and spinning it into polished dreams on their backs—it is enough. More than enough.” p. 511.

“From the molten basements of the world, two hundred miles down, it comes. One crystal in a seam of others. Pure carbon, each atom linked to four equidistant neighbors, perfectly knit, octahedral, unsurpassed in hardness. Already it is old: unfathomably so. Incalculable eons tumble past. The earth shifts, shrugs, stretches. One year, one day, one hour, a great up flow of magma gathers a seam of crystals and drives it toward the surface, mile after burning mile; it cools inside a huge, smoking xenolith of kimberlite, and there it waits. Bedrock becomes boulders, boulders become stones; the ice retreats, a lake forms, and galaxies of freshwater clams flap their million shells at the sun and close and die and the lake seeps away. Stands of prehistoric trees rise and fall and rise again in succession. Until another year, another day, another hour, when a storm claws one particular stone out of a canyon and sends it into a clattering flow of alluvium, where it eventually finds, one evening, the attention of a prince who knows what he is looking for.
It is cut, polished; for a breath, it passes between the hands of men.
Another hour, another day, another year. Lump of carbon no larger than a chestnut. Mantled with algae, bedecked with barnacles. Crawled over by snails. It stirs among the pebbles.” p. 520.

“People walk the paths of the gardens below, and the wind sings anthems in the hedges, and the big old cedars at the entrances to the maze creak. Marie-Laure imagines the electromagnetic waves traveling into and out of Michel’s machine, bending around them, just as Etienne used to describe, except now a thousand times more crisscross the air than when he lived—maybe a million times more. Torrents of text conversations, tides of cell conversations, of television programs, of e-mail, vast networks of fiber and wire interlaced above and beneath the city, passing through buildings, arcing between transmitters in Metro tunnels, between antennas atop buildings, from lampposts with cellular transmitters in them, commercials for Carrefour and Evian and prebaked toaster pastries flashing into space and back to earth again, I’m going to be late and Maybe we should get reservations? and Pick up avocados and What did he say? and ten thousand I miss yous, fifty thousand I love yous, hate mail and appointment reminders and market updates, jewelry ads, coffee ads, furniture ads flying invisibly over the warrens of Paris, over the battlefields and tombs, over the Ardennes, over the Rhine, over Belgium and Denmark, over the scarred and ever-shifting landscapes that we call nations. And is it so hard to believe that souls might also travel those paths? That her father and Etienne and Madame Manec and the German boy named Werner Pfennig might harry the sky in flocks, like egrets, like terns, like starlings? That great shuttles of souls might fly about, faded but audible if you listen closely enough? They flow above the chimneys, ride the sidewalks, slip through your jacket and shirt and breastbone and lungs, and pass out through the other side, the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.” p. 528-529.

—

Answer Me 1988

Written by Lee Woo-jung
Directed by Shin Won-ho

“There’s no need to force the harsh truth onto a small bit of happiness. Sometimes, you need an illusion to be happy.” Episode 2, 1:10:29.

“Is this the second Korean War or something? Why is it just Potatoville over here? Are we on emergency rations or something?” Episode 3, 00:05:10.

The father imitates the moms’ laughing, Episode 3.

Cramping. Episode 4, 01:11:11.

“Let’s use Korean products!” Episode 6, 00:36:00.

Lee Moon Sae. Episode 10.

Taek bursting out of the gate to smoke. Episode 12, 00:09:30.

“Loving someone is not just the feeling of wanting to give them things. It’s the desperate desire to give them things. To love someone does not only mean that you love to feel them near you…but it means that you love to acclimate yourself to them. And also, to love someone, means that no matter how much pain or grief that person causes you, you find yourself wanting to hate them so much, yet you can never bring yourself to hate them. To love someone…doesn’t mean that you don’t hate them. It means that you can’t hate them.” Episode 12.

Sun Woo’s Dad. Episode 14.

“What’s with you? Are you shooting a movie?” -looks around-. Dong Ryong, Episode 14.

—

Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World

Rebecca E. Karl

“Central to the Maoist theory of politics is a theory of the historical role of mass revolutionary consciousness and mass activity in transforming the structures of social life. In Maoism—particularly as compared to orthodox Marxism or even Leninism—consciousness and politics take priority over the givenness of social structure. That is, the structure of social relations may constrain the pace and degree of certain transformative activities—how power and wealth are redistributed; how the rural and urban relations of production are recalibrated; how the cultural level of the populace is raised; and so on. Nevertheless, according to Mao, the conscious activity of the masses can alter these given historical conditions of constraint. While many scholars have called this emphasis “voluntarism,” it it more appropriate simple to recognize there is no concept of politics in Maoism divorced from mass politics. For this reason, politics in Maoist theory and practice cannot be abstracted from everyday life, engaged in only by distant elites. It is, rather, part of quotidian existence itself, and most important, it is part of the struggle to transform social existence.” p. 58.

—

Kokoro

Soseki Natsume
Transl. by Edwin McClellan

“I believe that words uttered in passion contain a greater living truth than do words which express thoughts rationally conceived. It is blood that moves the body. Words are not meant to stir the air only; they are capable of moving greater things.” p. 142.

“It is true that everybody begins his university career cherishing great ambitions, like a man who sets out on a long journey; and that, after a year or two, most students suddenly realize the slowness of their progress and, seeing that graduation is not far off, find themselves in a state of disillusionment.” p. 173.

—

The Learning Child

Dorothy H. Cohen

“Five-year-olds are about ready to fit their longings and their fears into the framework of what is really so, but they need help. This does not mean that their imaginations need to be curtailed or their pleasure in make-believe destroyed. Rather, children must be helped to differentiate between the inner life and the outer reality, so that while they enjoy either, they are clear in their minds as to which is which. The child who pretends he is a fireman putting out a fire does not need an adult to build him a real blaze. Nor does the adult have to let a child know he is not a fireman and to stop kidding himself. The urgency of a child’s inner world of feeling needs to be avowed and directed into acceptable social behavior. At the same time, the free-flowing inner world of thought and imagination needs to be encouraged, even though differentiated from wishes and fears.” p. 66.

“Intellectual is of the mind, and the mind can grow deep and broad in intellectual strength without the ability to read at all. To an inquiring mind, the skill of reading is an open door; to a closed mind, it is a direction-finder on streets and avenues, and not much more.” p. 78.

—

Norwegian Wood

Haruki Murakami
Transl. by Jay Rubin

“Let’s see, now, what was Naoko talking about that day?
Of course: the ‘field well.’ I have no idea whether there was such a well. It might have been an image or a sign that existed only inside Naoko, like all the other things she used to spin into existence inside her mind in those dark days. Once she had described it to me, though, I was never able to think of that meadow scene without the well. From that day forward, the image of a thing I had never laid eyes on became inseparably fused to the actual scene of the field that lay before me. I can describe the well in minute detail. It lay precisely on the border where the meadow ended and the woods began—a dark opening in the earth a yard across, hidden by grass. Nothing marked its perimeter—no fence, no stone curb (at least not one that rose above ground level). It was nothing but a hole, a wide-open mouth. The stones of its collar had been weathered and turned a strange muddy-white. They were cracked and chunks were missing, and a little green lizard slithered into an open seam. You could lean over the edge and peer down to see nothing. All I knew about the well was its frightening depth. It was deep beyond measuring, and crammed full of darkness, as if all the world’s darknesses had been boiled down to their ultimate density.
‘It’s really, really deep,’ said Naoko, choosing her words with care. She would speak that way sometimes, slowing down to find the exact word she was looking for. ‘But no one knows where it is,’ she continued. ‘The one thing I know for sure is that it’s around here somewhere.’
Hands thrust into the pockets of her tweed jacket, she smiled at me as if to say ‘It’s true!’
‘Then it must be incredibly dangerous,’ I said. ‘A deep well, but nobody knows where it is. You could fall in and that’d be the end of you.’
‘The end. Aaaaaaaah! Splat! Finished.’
‘Things like that must happen.’
‘They do, every once in a while. Maybe one in two or three years. Somebody disappears all of a sudden, and they just can’t find him. So then the people around here say, “Oh, he fell in the field well.”‘
‘Not a nice way to die,’ I said.
‘No, it’s a terrible way to die,’ said Naoko, brushing a cluster of grass seed from her jacket. ‘The best thing would be to break your neck, but you’d probably just break your leg and then you couldn’t do a thing. You’d yell at the top of your lungs, but nobody would hear you, and you couldn’t expect anyone to find you, and you’d have centipedes and spiders crawling all over you, and the bones of the ones who died before are scattered all around you, and it’s dark and soggy, and high overhead there’s this tiny tiny circle of light like a winter moon. You die there in this place, little by little, all by yourself.’
‘Yuck, just thinking about it makes my flesh creep,’ I said. ‘Somebody should find the thing and build a wall around it.’
‘But nobody can find it. So make sure you don’t go off the path.’
‘Don’t worry, I won’t.’
Naoko took her left hand from her pocket and squeezed my hand. ‘Don’t you worry,’ she said. ‘You’ll be OK. You could go running all around here in the middle of the night and you’d never fall into the well. And as long as I stick with you, I won’t fall in, either.’
‘Never?’
‘Never!’
‘How can you be so sure?’
‘I just know,’ she said, increasing her grip on my hand and walking along in silence. ‘I know these things. I’m always right. It’s got nothing to do with logic: I just feel it. For example, when I’m really close to you like this, I’m not the least bit scared. Nothing dark or evil could ever tempt me.’
‘Well, that’s the answer,’ I said. ‘All you have to do is stay with me like this all the time.’
‘Do you mean that?’
‘Of course.’” p. 4-6.

“I said this one day to the doctor in charge of my case, and he told me that, in a sense, what I was feeling was right, that we are in here not to correct the deformation but to accustom ourselves to it: that one of our problems was our inability to recognize and accept our own deformities. Just as each person has certain idiosyncrasies in the way he or she walks, people have idiosyncrasies in the way they think and feel and see things, and though you might want to correct them, it doesn’t happen overnight, and if you try to force the issue in one case, something else might go funny. He gave me a very simplified explanation, of course, and it’s just one part of the problems we have, but I think I understand what he was trying to say. It may well be that we can never fully adapt to our deformities. Unable to find a place inside ourselves for the very real pain and suffering that these deformities cause, we come here to get away from such things. As long as we are here, we can get by without hurting others or being hurt by them because we know we are “deformed.” That’s what distinguishes us from the outside world: most people go about their lives unconscious of their deformities, while in this little world of ours the deformities themselves are a precondition. Just as Indians wear feathers on their heads to show what tribe they belong to, we wear our deformities in the open. And we live quietly so as not to hurt one another.” p. 113-114.

“’Waiting for the perfect love?’
‘No, even I know better than that. I’m looking for selfishness. Perfect selfishness. Like, say I tell you I want to eat strawberry shortbread. And you stop everything you’re doing and run out to buy it for me. And you come back out of breath and get down on your knees and hold this strawberry shortbread out to me. And I say I don’t want it any more and throw it out of the window. That’s what I’m looking for.’
‘I’m not sure that has anything to do with love,’ I said with some amazement.
‘It does,’ she said. ‘You just don’t know it. There are times in a girl’s life when things like that are incredibly important.’
‘Things like throwing strawberry shortbread out of the window?’
‘Exactly. And when I do it, I want the man to apologize to me. “Now I see, Midori. What a fool I’ve been! I should have known that you would lose your desire for strawberry shortbread. I have all the intelligence and sensitivity of a piece of donkey shit. To make it up to you, I’ll go out and buy you something else. What would you like? Chocolate mousse? Cheesecake?”‘
‘So then what?’
‘So then I’d give him all the love he deserves for what he’s done.’
‘Sounds crazy to me.’
‘Well, to me, that’s what love is. Not that anyone can understand me, though.’ Midori gave her head a little shake against my shoulder. ‘For a certain kind of person, love begins from something tiny or silly. From something like that or it doesn’t begin at all.’” p. 99-100.

“’We couldn’t bear to be apart. So if Kizuki had lived, I’m sure we would have been together, loving each other, and gradually growing unhappy.’
‘Unhappy? Why’s that?’
With her fingers, Naoko combed her hair back several times. She had taken her hairslide off, which made the hair fall over her face when she dropped her head forward.
‘Because we would have had to pay back the world what we owed it,’ she said, raising her eyes to mine. ‘The pain of growing up. We didn’t pay when we should have, so now the bills are due. Which is why Kizuki did what he did, and why I’m here. We were like kids who grew up naked on a desert island. If we got hungry, we’d just pick a banana; if we got lonely, we’d go to sleep in each other’s arms. But that kind of thing doesn’t last forever. We grew up fast and had to enter society. Which is why you were so important to us. You were the link connecting us with the outside. We were struggling through you to fit in with the outside world as best we could. In the end, it didn’t work, of course.’
I nodded.
‘I wouldn’t want you to think that we were using you, though. Kizuki really loved you. It just so happened that our connection with you was our first connection with anyone else. And it still is. Kizuki may be dead, but you are still my only link with the outside world. And just as Kizuki loved you, I love you. We never meant to hurt you, but we probably did; we probably ended up making a deep wound in your heart. It never occurred to us that anything like that might happen.’” p. 169-170.

“The night I played pool with Hatsumi, though, the thought of Kizuki never crossed my mind until the first game ended, and this came as a real shock to me. I had always assumed that I’d be reminded of Kizuki whenever I played pool. But not until the first game was over and I bought a Pepsi from a vending machine and started drinking it did I even think of him. It was the Pepsi machine that did it: there had been one in the pool hall we used to play in, and we had often bet drinks on the outcomes of our games.
I feel guilty that I hadn’t thought of Kizuki straight away, as if I had somehow abandoned him. Back in my room, though, I came to think of it like this: two-and-a-half years have gone by since it happened, and Kizuki is still 17 years old. Not that this means my memory of him has faded. The things that his death gave rise to are still there, bright and clear, inside me, some of them even clearer than when they were new. What I want to say is this: I’m going to turn 20 soon. Part of what Kizuki and I shared when we were 16 and 17 has already vanished, and no amount of crying is going to bring that back. I can’t explain it better than this, but I think that you can probably understand what I felt and what I am trying to say. In fact, you are probably the only one in the world who can understand.” p. 286-287.

“I felt no sadness in that strange place. Death was death, and Naoko was Naoko. ‘What’s the problem?’ she asked me with a bashful smile. ‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ Her familiar little gestures soothed my heart like a healing balm. ‘If this is death,’ I thought to myself, ‘then death is not so bad.’ ‘It’s true,’ said Naoko, ‘death is nothing much. It’s just death. Things are easy for me here.’ Naoko spoke to me in the spaces between the crashing of the dark waves.
Eventually, though, the tide would pull back, and I would be left on the beach alone. Powerless, I could go nowhere; sadness itself would envelop me in deep darkness until the tears came. I felt less that I was crying than that the tears were simply oozing out of my like perspiration.
I had learned one thing from Kizuki’s death, and I believed that I had made it a part of myself in the form of a philosophy: ‘Death exists, not as the opposite but as part of life.’
By living our lives, we nurture death. True as this might be, it was only one of the truths we had to learn. What I learned from Naoko’s death was this: no truth can cure the sadness we feel from losing a loved one. No truth, no sincerity, no strength, no kindness, can cure that sorrow. All we can do is see that sadness through to the end and learn something from it, but what we learn will be no help in facing the next sadness that comes to us without warning. Hearing the waves at night, listening to the sound of the wind, day after day I focused on these thoughts of mine. Knapsack on my back, sand in my hair, I moved farther and farther west, surviving on a diet of whisky, bread, and water.” p. 360-361.

—

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Haruki Murakami
Transl. by Philip Gabriel

“Jealousy–at least as far as he understood it from his dream–was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key. And not another soul in the world knew he was locked inside. Of course if he wanted to escape, he could do so. The prison was, after all, his own heart. But he couldn’t make that decision. His heart was as hard as a stone wall. This was the very essence of jealousy.” pp. 51-52.

“‘It’s too bad you’re in the physics department. You should open a restaurant,’ Tsukuru said, half joking.
Haida laughed. ‘That sounds good. But I don’t like to be tied down in one place. I want to be free–to go where I want, when I want, and be able to think about whatever I want.’
‘Sure, but that can’t be easy to actually do.’
‘It isn’t. But I’ve made up my mind. I always want to be free. I like cooking, but I don’t want to be holed up in a kitchen doing it as a job. If that happened, I’d end up hating somebody.’
‘Hating somebody?’
‘The cook hates the waiter, and they both hate the customer,‘ Haida said. ‘A line from the Arnold Wesker play The Kitchen. People whose freedom is taken away always end up hating somebody. Right? I know I don’t want to live like that.’
‘Never being constrained, thinking about things freely–that’s what you’re hoping for?’
‘Exactly.’
‘But it seems to me that thinking about things freely can’t be easy.’
‘It means leaving behind your physical body. Leaving the cage of your physical flesh, breaking free of the chains, and letting pure logic soar free. Giving a natural life to logic. That’s the core of free thought.’
‘It doesn’t sound easy.’
Haida shook his head. ‘No, depending on how you look at it, it’s not hard. Most people do it at times, without even realizing it. That’s how they manage to stay sane. They’re just not aware that’s what they’re doing.'” pp. 72-73.

“‘I may not have a chance to see you again,’ Aka said as they walked down the hallway. ‘So there’s one more thing I wanted to tell you. You don’t mind, do you?’
Tsukuru shook his head.
‘It’s the first thing that I always say at our new employee training seminars. I gaze around the room, pick one person, and have him stand up. And this is what I say: I have some good news for you, and some bad news. The bad news first. We’re going to have to rip off either your fingernails or your toenails with pliers. I’m sorry, but it’s already decided. It can’t be changed. I pull out a huge, scary pair of pliers from my briefcase and show them to everybody. Slowly, making sure everybody gets a good look. And then I say: Here’s the good news. You have the freedom to choose which it’s going to be–your fingernails, or your toenails. So, which will it be? You have ten seconds to make up your mind. If you’re unable to decide, we’ll rip off both your fingernails and your toenails. I start the count. At about eight seconds most people say, ‘The toes.’ Okay, I say, toenails it is. I’ll use these pliers to rip them off. But before I do, I’d like you to tell me something. Why did you choose your toes and not your fingers? The person usually says, ‘I don’t know. I think they probably hurt the same. But since I had to choose one, I went with the toes.’ I turn to him and warmly applaud him. And I say, Welcome to the real world.’
Tsukuru gazed wordlessly at his old friend’s delicate face.
‘Each of us is given the freedom to choose,’ Aka said, winking and smiling. ‘That’s the point of the story.’
The silver door of the elevator slid open soundlessly, and they said goodbye.” pp. 217-218.

“‘You know, Tsukuru, you need to hang on to her. No matter what. I really believe that. If you let her go now, you might not ever have anyone else in your life.’
‘But I don’t have any confidence.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I have no sense of self. I have no personality, no brilliant color. I have nothing to offer. That’s always been my problem. I feel like an empty vessel. I have a shape, I guess, as a container, but there’s nothing inside. I just can’t see myself as the right person for her. I think that the more time passes, and the more she knows about me, the more disappointed Sara will be, and the more she’ll choose to distance herself from me.’
⋮
‘Let’s say you are an empty vessel. So what? What’s wrong with that?’ Eri said. ‘You’re still a wonderful, attractive vessel. And really, does anybody know who they are? So why not be a completely beautiful vessel? The kind people feel good about, the kind people want to entrust with precious belongings.'” pp. 336-337.

“‘Tsukuru, there’s one thing I want you to remember. You aren’t colorless. Those were just names. I know we often teased you about it, but it was just a stupid joke. Tsukuru Tazaki is a wonderful, colorful person. A person who builds fantastic stations. A healthy thirty-six-year-old citizen, a voter, a taxpayer–someone who could fly all the way to Finland just to see me. You don’t lack anything. Be confident and be bold. That’s all you need. Never let fear and stupid pride make you lose someone who’s precious to you.'” pp. 341-342.

“After this, he no longer had a place to go, or a place to which he could return. His house was still in Nagoya, his mother and eldest sister still living there, his room the same as he’d left it. His other older sister was also living in the city. Once or twice a year he made an obligatory visit and was always warmly received, but there was nothing he needed to talk to his mother or sister about, and being with them never brought back any nostalgic feelings. What they sought from him was the Tsukuru of old, a person he had left behind and no longer needed. To revive that person, and present him to his family, necessitated that he play a role that made him uncomfortable. The streets of Nagoya now felt remote and dreary. There was nothing there he wanted, nothing that called up even a hint of warmth.” pp. 370-371.

“Tsukuru remembered those days in college when all he’d thought about was dying. Already sixteen years ago. Back then he was convinced that if he merely focused on what was going on inside of him, his heart would finally stop of its own accord. That if he intensely concentrated his feelings on one fixed point, like a lens focused on paper, bursting it into flames, his heart would suffer a fatal blow. More than anything he hoped for this. But months passed, and contrary to his expectations, his heart didn’t stop. The heart apparently doesn’t stop that easily.” p. 377.

—

When Breath Becomes Air

Paul Kalanithi

“Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.” p. 43.

“He went on to describe the planned operation, the likely outcomes and possibilities, what decisions needed to be made now, what decisions they should start thinking about but didn’t need to decide on immediately, and what sorts of decisions they should not worry about at all yet. By the end of the conversation, the family was not at ease, but they seemed to be able to face the future. I had watched the parents’ faces–at first wan, dull, almost otherworldly–sharpen and focus. And as I sat there, I realized that the questions intersecting life, death, and meaning, questions that all people face at some point, usually arise in a medical context. In the actual situations where one encounters these questions, it becomes a necessarily philosophical and biological exercise. Humans are organisms, subject to physical laws, including, alas, the one that says entropy always increases. Diseases are molecules misbehaving; the basic requirement of life is metabolism, and death its cessation.” p. 70.

“The word hope first appeared in English about a thousand years ago, denoting some combination of confidence and desire. But what I desired–life–was not what I was confident about–death. When I talked about hope, then, did I really mean “Leave some room for unfounded desire?” No. Medical statistics not only describe numbers such as mean survival, they measure our confidence in our numbers, with tools like confidence levels, confidence intervals, and confidence bounds. So did I mean “Leave some room for a statistically improbable but still plausible outcome–a survival just above the measured 95 percent confidence interval?” Is that what hope was? Could we divide the curve into existential sections, from “defeated” to “pessimistic” to “realistic” to “hopeful” to “delusional?” Weren’t the numbers just the numbers? Had we all just given in to the “hope” that every patient was above average?” p. 133-134.

“Lost in a featureless wasteland of my own mortality, and finding no traction in the reams of scientific studies, intracellular molecular pathways, and endless curves of survival statistics, I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Montaigne, Frost, Greville, memories of cancer patients–anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality. I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet not I felt that to understand my own direct experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.” p. 148-149.

“Yet the paradox is that scientific methodology is the product of human hands and thus cannot reach some permanent truth. We build scientific theories to organize and manipulate the world, to reduce phenomena into manageable units. Science is based on reproducibility and manufactured objectivity. As strong as that makes its ability to generate claims about matter and energy, it also makes scientific knowledge inapplicable to the existential, visceral nature of human life, which is unique and subjective and unpredictable. Science may provide the most useful way to organize empirical, reproducible data, but its power to do so is predicated on its inability to grasp the most central aspects of human life: hope, fear, love, hate, beauty, envy, honor, weakness, striving, suffering, virtue.” p. 169-170.

—

Fresh Off the Boat

Eddie Huang

“Warren, on the other hand, was a Republican because of his dad. My parents were the same way; they’d always tell me to vote for whoever wanted lower taxes. I’d argue with Warren, but it’s a funny thing with people. Even if you argue, when that person isn’t around to say their piece, you say it for them. You may not even link with their point, but out of loyalty you make that man’s point for him ’cause he ain’t there. Years later, in college, surrounded by cynical liberals like myself, I’d say things that I swear came out of Warren’s mouth and it helped me understand that old saying that no man is an island. People ask me what my greatest strengths are and I say perspective. The best way to get that is to meet people that are polar opposites; you learn the most from them. There are pieces of you that are inherently yours, but everything else is a collection of the things you’ve seen and the people you’ve met. In the end, we’re like the Triumph beat: who’s next on this RZA track? Step up and drop a verse on my story. That’s the illest.” p. 105.

“Ning also got me back in touch with my identity. While I was out drinking Mad Dog 40/40 and running over frat boys with Mitsubishi Monteros, she went to Chinese school on weekends all the way up until her senior year of high school. Instead of sneaking into bars or clubs, she was going to Bubble Island with her girlfriends. We kept making fun of each other, but as they say, opposites attract. I had become so obsessed with not being a stereotype that half of who I was had gone dormant. But it was also a positive. Instead of following the path most Asian kids do, I struck out on my own. There’s nature, there’s nurture, and as Harry Potter teaches us, there’s who YOU want to be. Every part of me was something I sought out and encountered. And that summer in Taipei, I looked around and saw myself everywhere I went. Pieces of me scattered all over the country like I had lived, died, burned, and been spread throughout the country in a past life. Here I was coming home to find myself again in street stalls, KTV rooms, and bowls of beef noodle soup. All the things instilled in me from a young age by my family and home, rehydrated and brought to life like instant noodles. They never left, they just needed attention.” p. 198.

“Not only was the J.D. a bad investment, but the law wasn’t anything I thought it would be. It wasn’t about justice. All those courtrooms with Lady Justice holding scales are just pitching propaganda. If courtrooms had a statue of Justice Scalia with the inscription ‘Most People Fux Wit Us,’ that’d be closer to the truth. Not very inspiring.” p. 211.

“The prize was a job at a top 100 law firm. The reaction from other students at Cardozo was hilarious. People were so competitive and saw every job someone else got as a job that they lost. I didn’t agree and told people what Cam’rom said: ‘Can’t get paid in a earth this big? You worthless kid!'” p. 212.

“Barry had a false sense of confidence. He had been impressing his white friends for years with his ‘knowledge’ of Chinese food and figured he could school me, but it was a joke. One of his friends at dinner that night mixed his sauces and said to the table, ‘You know, it’s pretty good when you mix it, Barry.’ For the most part, people who have grown up eating a food their entire lives love learning new techniques or variations within the same pantry. My mom’s beef noodle soup takes on new ingredients every three to five years, and hot pot seems to find a new protein every season. I’m confident in my taste because it’s been refined over thirty years of eating the same dishes hundreds of times. The problem with expats is that they never get to say shit in China. When they’re over there, they are like dogs being led around from restaurant to restaurant by locals trying to take them for a ride. They may taste one or two variations of a dish and form opinions based on that cursory knowledge, hanging on every word like it’s the holy grail. When the expat gets home, he’s in such a rush to impress false maxims on any fool who will listen. People who don’t understand something need poles to grasp, but those who truly love and understand something through experience don’t need those training wheels. Food is that way for me. There’s a difference between bastardizing an item and giving it the room to breathe, grow, and change with the times. When Chinese people cook Chinese food or Jamaicans cook Jamaican, there’s no question what’s going on. Just make it taste good. When foreigners cook our food, they want to infuse their identity into the dish, they have a need to be part of the story and take it over. For some reason, Americans simply can’t understand why this bothers us. ‘I just want to tell my story?!? I loved my vacation to Burma! What’s wrong with that?’ It’s imperialism at work in a sauté pan. You already have everything, do you really really, really need a Burmese hood pass, too? Can we live?” pp. 247-248.

“On the twenty-sixth, we opened up a couple of hours late and a good number of people came in to try our bars. Without us saying anything, everyone was comparing it to Momofuku, which we wanted to happen. The difference was that we braised our pork. Although Chang is Korean-American, his technique is French. Even bo ssam, a Korean pork belly fish, uses steamed pork belly. Asians don’t use the oven for anything but holding Jordans.” pp. 263-264.

“One of the biggest challenges we faced came from cheap-ass Taiwanese people. I remember one chick came up to me and said, ‘You know, these baos are a lot more expensive than [in] Taiwan. In Taipei, they are much bigger and cost less than a dollar!’
‘Well, why don’t you buy a nine-hundred-dollar plane ticket and go buy yourself a one-dollar bao.'” pp. 267-268.

“We almost never hired experienced cooks, because the goal was to create a team of artists who just happened to work at Baohaus while pursuing other dreams. It was a revolving door, but I wanted it that way. I hated growing up working at places like Boston Market that expected you to treat the job like it was your life. I’m cleaning chicken butts, motherfucker, this ain’t a lifestyle, this a cot damn problem!” p. 268.