Surbhi S > Surbhi's Quotes

“you don’t want to live just one life, which could be typed, which could be tossed off in a thumbnail sketch = “She was the sort of girl ….” And end in 25 words or less. You want to live as many lives as you can …”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“There is a certain unique and strange delight about walking down an empty street alone. There is an off-focus light cast by the moon, and the streetlights are part of the spotlight apparatus on a bare stage set up for you to walk through. You get a feeling of being listened to, so you talk aloud, softly, to see how it sounds:”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“Face it, kid: unless you can be yourself, you won’t stay with anyone for long. You’ve got to be able to talk. That’s tough. But spend your nights learning, so you’ll have something to say.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“A faith, naive and child like perhaps, born as it is from the infinite simplicity of nature. It is a feeling that no matter what the ideas or conduct of others, there is a unique rightness and beauty to life which can be shared in openness, in wind and sunlight, with a fellow human being who believes in the same basic principles.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

“I don’t know if I will have the time to write any more letters, because I might be too busy trying to participate. So, if this does end up being the last letter, I just want you to know that I was in a bad place before I started high school, and you helped me. Even if you didn’t know what I was talking about, or know someone who’s gone through it, you made me not feel alone. Because I know there are people who say all these things don’t happen. And there are people who forget what it’s like to be sixteen when they turn seventeen. I know these will all be stories some day, and our pictures will become old photographs. We all become somebody’s mom or dad. But right now, these moments are not stories. This is happening. I am here, and I am looking at her. And she is so beautiful. I can see it. This one moment when you know you’re not a sad story. You are alive. And you stand up and see the lights on the buildings and everything that makes you wonder. And you’re listening to that song, and that drive with the people who you love most in this world. And in this moment, I swear, we are infinite.”
― Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“It’s easy to be an armchair contrarian. It’s hard to take contrarian action: to question the dominant narrative, to be honest with yourself, to tell the truth even when the immediate outcome is pain”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don't Truly Want

“Human beings fight not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves have made themselves into enemy twins, human doubles in reciprocal violence.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life

“It’s not enough to know what is good and true. Goodness and truth need to be attractive—in other words, desirable.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don't Truly Want

“The more people fight, the more they come to resemble each other. We should choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don't Truly Want

“The Romantic Lie is self-delusion, the story people tell about why they make certain choices: because it fits their personal preferences, or because they see its objective qualities, or because they simply saw it and therefore wanted it. They believe that there is a straight line between them and the things they want. That’s a lie. The truth is that the line is always curved.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don't Truly Want

“The pride that makes a person believe they are unaffected by or inoculated against biases, weaknesses, or mimesis blinds them to their complicity in the game.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don't Truly Want

“rivalry is a function of proximity.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don't Truly Want

“People worry about what other people will think before they say something—which affects what they say. In other words, our perception of reality changes reality by altering the way we might otherwise act. This leads to a self-fulfilling circularity.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don't Truly Want

“Desire doesn’t spread like information; it spreads like energy. It passes from person to person like the energy between people at a concert or political rally. This energy can lead to a cycle of positive desire, in which healthy desires gain momentum and lead to other healthy desires, uniting people in positive ways; or it can become a cycle of negative desire, in which mimetic rivalries lead to conflict and discord.”
― Luke Burgis, Wanting: Mimetic Desire: How to Avoid Chasing Things You Don't Truly Want

“A man without ever the least appearance of anger, or any other passion; able at the same time most exactly to observe the Stoic Apathia, or unpassionateness, and yet to be most tender-hearted: ever of good credit; and yet almost without any noise, or rumour: very learned, and yet making little show.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Self-scrutiny, relentless observance of one’s thoughts, is a stark and shattering experience. It pulverises the stoutest ego. But true self-analysis mathematically operates to produce seers.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

“India’s unwritten law for the truth seeker is patience; a master may purposely make a test of one’s eagerness to meet him.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

“The scientist seldom knows contemporaneous reward; it is enough to possess the joy of creative service.”
― Paramahansa Yogananda, Autobiography of a Yogi

“Art is a nakedness, you have to be free to decide when you’re comfortable with it, and with whom.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“You can be whatever you want to in life, as long as you don’t become a critic! Not of other people, and not of yourself. It’s so easy to be a critic, any coward can do that. But art doesn’t need critics, art has enough enemies already. Art needs friends.”
― Fredrik Backman, My Friends

“It has always been a conscious, fundamentally human choice to remember some things, to keep reminders and save keepsakes, to store mementos in a little box on the top shelf in our room and take it down once every year to dust and laugh fondly over. Parallelly, it is a conscious, fundamentally human choice to strive to not remember some things, to throw away old cards, to return old gifts, to refuse to wear a certain colour or go to a certain part of town because it reminds us too much of something that hurts. But I keep circling back to a key question: what happens to us when the internet starts making these choices for us?”
― Ria Chopra, Never Logged Out: How the Internet Created India's Gen Z

“Sometimes when you re-read old arguments that occurred over text, you might end up feeling just as angry as you were when they first happened. The human ability – the human compulsion – to forget the exact angry words exchanged during interpersonal conflicts is actually essential to resolving those conflicts, because allowing the words, and hence their impact, to fade over time brings us closer to resolution and moving on. Digital archives preclude such possibilities entirely.”
― Ms Ria Chopra, Never Logged Out: How the Internet Created India's Gen Z