"Barre feels like exercise the way Sweetgreen feels like eating: both might better be categorized as mechanisms that help you adapt to arbitrary, prolonged agony. As a form of exercise, barre is ideal for an era in which everyone has to work constantly--you can be back at the office in five minutes, no shower necessary--and in which women are still expected to look unreasonably good."

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Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion by Jia Tolentino

"It was always odd to reemerge from the fog of the weekend into work on Monday mornings, but today it was a hundred times so. She questioned every object--the dimensions of her desk, the hue of her chair, the angle of her computer monitor."
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The Need by Helen Phillips

Three Laws of Psychopharmacology
The very definition of an addictive drug is one that stimulates the mesolimbic pathway, but there are three general axioms in psychopharmacology that also apply to all drugs:
1. All drugs act by changing the rate of what is already going on.
2. All drugs have side effects.
3. The brain adapts to all drugs that affect it by counteracting the drug's effects.

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Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction by Judith Grisel


"All my life I have overheard, all my life I have listened to what people will let slip when they think you are part of their we. A we is so powerful. It is the most corrupt and formidable institution on earth."
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Priestdaddy: A Memoir by Patricia Lockwood

"Robespierre...dismissed [Fabre] as a man 'of principles but no virtue; talents but no soul; skillful in the art of depicting men, much more skillful in deceiving them.'"

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A Year in Paris: Season by Season in the City of Light by John Baxter

"They went down the stairs. It was still quite early, a few minutes after eight. They walked to the bus stop on Westbourne Grove. Clouds moved in the sky, the sun came and went, and as they reached the corner the wind dislodged blossoms from all the trees in the street."
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Turbulence by David Szalay

"...data shows that nitrogen from salmon speeds up the growth of trees so much that Sitka spruce in these areas grow up to three times faster than they would have without the fish fertilizer."

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The Secret Wisdom of Nature by Peter Wohlleben

"If it weren't for having to read the Quran every day since as far back as I remember, I would have believed I didn't deserve to be happy, to be loved, or to have a choice in who I married. I would have spent my entire life believing that violence was just a given, a reality that I had no choice but to tolerate. But Allah, my Allah, told me that I deserved better."

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We Have Always Been Here: A Queer Muslim Memoir by Samra Habib

"...I had been reading Carl Jung, who, after World War II, long consumed by the question of what made people evil, or complicit in evil, settled on a single, elegant explanation. He believed that ostracizing any aspect of the human experience, however ugly, created a "shadow" of our rejected bits that we drag behind us. If we do not see that the shadow belongs to us, we project it onto others, both individually and as a culture. To face and own what most disturbs you about yourself, Jung believed, is the among the central moral tasks of being human."
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Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man by Thomas Page McBee

"...I have an instinct for the onset of violence...If, as a child, you are struck or hit, you will never forget that sense of your own powerlessness and vulnerability, of how a situation can turn from benign to brutal in the blink of an eye, in the space of a breath. That sensibility will run in your veins, like an antibody. You learn fairly quickly to recognise the approach of these sudden acts against you: that particular pitch or vibration in the atmosphere."  
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I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death by Maggie O'Farrell

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