Jennifer > Jennifer's Quotes

“Asana is perfect firmness of body, steadiness of intelligence, and benevolence of spirit.”
― B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom

“Action is movement with intelligence.”
― B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom

“Death, of course, is not a failure. Death is normal. Death may be the enemy, but it is also the natural order of things.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“The job of any doctor, Bludau later told me, is to support quality of life, by which he meant two things: as much freedom from the ravages of disease as possible and the retention of enough function for active engagement in the world.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“In the horrible places, the battle for control escalates until you get tied down or locked into your Geri-chair or chemically subdued with psychotropic medications. In the nice ones, a staff member cracks a joke, wags an affectionate finger, and takes your brownie stash away. In almost none does anyone sit down with you and try to figure out what living a life really means to you under the circumstances, let alone help you make a home where that life becomes possible. This is the consequence of a society that faces the final phase of the human life cycle by trying not to think about it. We end up with institutions that address any number of societal goals—from freeing up hospital beds to taking burdens off families’ hands to coping with poverty among the elderly—but never the goal that matters to the people who reside in them: how to make life worth living when we’re weak and frail and can’t fend for ourselves anymore.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“The lesson seems almost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“ODTAA syndrome: the syndrome of One Damn Thing After Another.”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“Being mortal is about the struggle to cope with the constraints of our biology, with the limits set by genes and cells and flesh and bone. Medical science has given us remarkable power to push against these limits, and the potential value of this power was a central reason I became a doctor. But again and again, I have seen the damage we in medicine do when we fail to acknowledge that such power is finite and always will be. We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being. And well-being is about the reasons one wishes to be alive. Those reasons matter not just at the end of life, or when debility comes, but all along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“What is your understanding of the situation and its potential outcomes? What are your fears and what are your hopes? What are the trade-offs you are willing to make and not willing to make? And what is the course of action that best serves this understanding?”
― Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End

“It is Einstein’s famous equation E=MC^2, in which E is energy (rajas), M is mass (tamas), and C is the speed of light (sattva). Energy, mass, and light are endlessly bound together in the universe.”
― B.K.S. Iyengar, Light on Life: The Yoga Journey to Wholeness, Inner Peace, and Ultimate Freedom

“The truth is, it’s hard to get people to like you, but it’s even harder to keep people liking you.”
― Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me?

“Fortunes are made from scarcities, and the richest people are those who notice the scarcities first.”
― Shlomo Benartzi, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior

“The lesson is simple: human attention has become the sweet crude oil of the twenty-first century. If you can control the levers of human attention, then you can essentially charge whatever you’d like.”
― Shlomo Benartzi, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior

“There is a larger lesson here: we need to treat attention as a literal resource.”
― Shlomo Benartzi, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior

“according to a recent paper published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, patients failing to properly take their medication cost society somewhere between $100 billion and $289 billion every year.36 (It’s estimated that nearly 50 percent of prescriptions for chronic diseases are not used as prescribed.)37 Obesity, meanwhile, adds another $190 billion in direct health care costs. Drunk driving? $114 billion.38 Smoking? Nearly $290 billion.”
― Shlomo Benartzi, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior

“We are so used to thinking of our conscious selves as in charge that all the evidence documenting our lack of control—how much we depend on split-second perceptions and aesthetic judgments—is rather scary.”
― Shlomo Benartzi, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior

“I will leave you with one last piece of advice, which is: If you’ve got it, flaunt it. And if you don’t got it? Flaunt it. ’Cause what are we even doing here if we’re not flaunting it?”
― Mindy Kaling, Why Not Me?

“After all, behavioral economists have spent years demonstrating the clear relationship between making something easy to do and getting people to actually do it. My very good friend and longtime collaborator Richard Thaler puts it this way: “My number-one mantra from Nudge [his book, cowritten with Cass Sunstein, on the application of behavioral economic principles to public policy] is, ‘Make it easy.’ When I say make it easy, what I mean is, if you want to get somebody to do something, make it easy. If you want to get people to eat healthier foods, then put healthier foods in the cafeteria, and make them easier to find, and make them taste better. So in every meeting I say, ‘Make it easy.’ It’s kind of obvious, but it’s also easy to miss.”7”
― Shlomo Benartzi, The Smarter Screen: Surprising Ways to Influence and Improve Online Behavior

“I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater. Lying awake, I tried to recall all my best memories of her—to freeze her in my mind so I wouldn’t forget her—but instead of birthdays and happy times I kept remembering things like how a few days before she was killed she’d stopped me halfway out the door to pick a thread off my school jacket. For some reason, it was one of the clearest memories I had of her: her knitted eyebrows, the precise gesture of her reaching out to me, everything. Several times too—drifting uneasily between dreaming and sleep—I sat up suddenly in bed at the sound of her voice speaking clearly in my head, remarks she might conceivably have made at some point but that I didn’t actually remember, things like Throw me an apple, would you? and I wonder if this buttons up the front or the back? and This sofa is in a terrible state of disreputableness.”
― Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

“Three profoundly destabilizing scientific ideas ricochet through the twentieth century, trisecting it into three unequal parts: the atom, the byte, the gene.”
― Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History

“Pandemics often come in waves, and the cumulative “morbidity” rate—the number of people who get sick in all the waves combined—often exceeds 50 percent. One virologist considers influenza so infectious that he calls it “a special instance” among infectious diseases, “transmitted so effectively that it exhausts the supply of susceptible hosts.”
― John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

“It’s just that the thing you never understand about being a mother, until you are one, is that it is not the grown man—the galumphing, unshaven, stinking, opinionated offspring—you see before you, with his parking tickets and unpolished shoes and complicated love life. You see all the people he has ever been all rolled up into one.”
― Jojo Moyes, Me Before You

“Parents will have no shortage of individuals dissuading them from seeking evaluation; professionals should think carefully before adding themselves to that group, because evaluation has very little risk, and in cases where a delay exists, the child will have everything to gain. Practitioners should also inoculate parents against caring family members who nonetheless may try to dissuade them from seeking an evaluation, and provide them with ways to explain to family the importance of the evaluation and the benefit of treatment for the child, using the arguments above about the low risks and potential high benefits of evaluation.”
― Kate E. Fiske, Autism and the Family: Understanding and Supporting Parents and Siblings

“Your own experiences and the echoes of your ancestors’ experiences influence the way you think, feel, and behave. They are major determinants of your health. And being aware of this can help us remember that everything we do right now is going to echo into the future. Our actions matter; we are impacting the next generations. So are we being as mindful as we could?”
― Bruce D. Perry, What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

“What things did you do to cultivate simplicity?” “I stopped wearing expensive clothes, I kicked my addiction to six newspapers a day, I stopped needing to be available to everyone all the time, I became a vegetarian and I ate less. Basically, I reduced my needs. You see, John, unless you reduce your needs, you will never be fulfilled. You will always be like that gambler in Las Vegas, staying at the roulette wheel for ‘just one more spin’ in the hope that your lucky number will come up. You will always want more than you have. How can you ever be happy?”
― Robin S. Sharma, The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari: A Remarkable Story About Living Your Dreams

“I think what she was having a problem with was the label; she didn’t want to label him. For whatever reason, people don’t like to label things. I sort of look at it as he is who he is, it doesn’t really matter what we call it. The label gets him services that he needs.”
― Kate E. Fiske, Autism and the Family: Understanding and Supporting Parents and Siblings

“We also have a problem because sometimes we wanted to do stuff with other people, and they are not as accommodating. We wind up not going, and it looks like we chose not to go, but really we couldn’t go because there were all these factors that needed to be in place for us to go on vacation with them. We couldn’t [get them in place], and they didn’t want to bend a little bit, so we couldn’t do it. When family members have expectations that are unrealistic, parents can be placed in an awkward position of having to adapt to these expectations or explain that the expectations are unrealistic.”
― Kate E. Fiske, Autism and the Family: Understanding and Supporting Parents and Siblings

“The forty-hour week is there for a reason; it gets the best work from people. The first four hours of work are the most productive and, as the day wears on, everyone becomes less alert, less focused, and prone to more mistakes. In 1908, the first known study by Ernst Abbe,5 one of the founders of the Zeiss lens laboratory, concluded that reducing the working day from nine to eight hours actually increased output. Henry Ford, who studied productivity issues obsessively, reached the same conclusion and infuriated his manufacturing colleagues when, in 1926, he had the audacity to introduce a forty-hour work week. Subsequent studies by Foster Wheeler (1968), Procter & Gamble (1980), members of the construction industry, and many, many more show that, as the days get longer, productivity declines. No study has ever convincingly argued otherwise.6”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Moreover, sleep deprivation starts to starve the brain. There is a reason why we start to eat comfort food—doughnuts, candy—when we’re tired: our brains crave sugar. After twenty-four hours of sleep deprivation, there is an overall reduction of 6 percent in glucose reaching the brain.9 But the loss isn’t shared equally; the parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex lose 12 to 14 percent of their glucose. And those are the areas we need most for thinking: for distinguishing between ideas, for social control, and to be able to tell the difference between good and bad.10 To Charles Czeisler, professor of sleep medicine at Harvard Medical School, encouraging a culture of sleepless machismo is downright dangerous.11 He’s amazed by today’s work cultures that glorify sleeplessness, the way the age of Mad Men once glorified people who could hold their drink.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril

“Because it takes less brain power to believe than to doubt, we are, when tired or distracted, gullible.25 Because we are all biased, and biases are quick and effortless, exhaustion makes us favor the information we know and are comfortable with. We’re too tired to do the heavier lifting of examining new or contradictory information, so we fall back on our biases, the opinions and the people we already trust.”
― Margaret Heffernan, Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril