The latter therapy has its roots in a philosophy called Naikan, developed by Ishin Yoshimoto. Naikan reminds people to be grateful for everything. If you are sitting in a chair, you need to realize th...
Reading isn't the opposite of doing, it's the opposite of dying
Reading is a respite from the restlessness of technology, but it's not only that. It's how I reset and recharge. It's how I escape, but it's also how I engage. And reading should spur further engageme...
Pass the time? said the Queen. Books are not about passing the time. They’re about other lives. Other worlds. Far from wanting time to pass, Sir Kevin, one just wishes one had more of it. If one wante...
Mom would often talk about a refugee boy she’d met in a hospital in Afghanistan. He was the victim of a land mine and had lost a leg. She said to him that she brought greetings to him from schoolchild...
Mom also believed that there is such a thing as a good secret. Maybe something kind you did for someone but didn’t want that person to know, because you didn’t want him to be embarrassed or feel as th...
If heathen prayers were indeed the best of all, then mine should count big time.
I flipped open to read the marked passage in Daily Strength: It is not by regretting what is irreparable that true work is to be done, but by making the best of what we are. It is not by complaining t...
How does a doctor tell you that it’s over, that there are things they could do but probably shouldn’t, and that if your aim is quality of life and not quantity of life, there simply are no good next t...
Books have played a role in almost every one of the world's great civil and human rights movements, but only because people who read them decided to act. Reading brings with it responsibility.
Life depends on what she thinks of as ‘big bursts’ and ‘little bursts.’ Big bursts are things like marriage or children, intimacies that keep you afloat, but these big bursts hold dangerous, unseen cu...
Joy is a product not of whether characters live or die but of what they’ve realized and achieved, or how they are remembered.
At about page twenty or so, the magical thing occurred that happens only with the very best books: I became absorbed and obsessed and entered the Can’t you see I’m reading? mode.
When we denigrate mediocrity, we discourage ourselves and others from trying new things. It would be great to be a great painter, but it's also great just to paint. Or sing or throw pots or knit scarv...
That’s one of the things books do. They help us talk. But they also give us something we all can talk about when we don’t want to talk about ourselves. Mom
Mom was often asked to give speeches about why she felt so committed to the cause of refugees. She would say, Just imagine that you are awakened tonight by someone in your family who says to you, ‘Put...
Mom had always taught all of us to examine decisions by reversibility—that is, to hedge our bets. When you couldn’t decide between two things, she suggested you choose the one that allowed you to chan...
For me, there’s something about planes that isolates and intensifies sadness, the way a looking glass can magnify the sun until it grows unbearably hot and burns.
But the thing that made it most interesting is what it had to say about books and religion. I love how Brooks shows that every great religion shares a love of books, of reading, of knowledge. The indi...
And reading all different kinds of books is not simply reading all different kinds of books; it’s a way of becoming more fully human and more humane.