VnthVcid

One True Thing

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Yoga was originally practised by holy ascetics in India, its aim to focus the mind, connect with a higher consciousness and, through this newfound compassion, end suffering in the world.

The Guardian

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Resolutely I stared at the television. I hadn’t been at school since the day before my mother died and as long as I stayed away her death seemed unofficial somehow.

But once I went back it would be a public fact. Worse: the thought of returning to any kind of normal routine seemed disloyal, wrong. It kept being a shock every time I remembered it, a fresh slap: she was gone.

Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

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At first, when we truly love someone, our greatest fear is that the loved one will stop loving us. What we should fear and dread, of course, is that we won’t stop loving them, even after they’re dead and gone.

//

For I still love you with the whole of my heart, Prabaker. I still love you. And sometimes, my friend, the love that I have, and can’t give to you, crushes the breath from my chest.

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Sometimes, even now, my heart is drowning in a sorrow that has no stars without you, and no laughter, and no sleep.

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When he looked away again, it was as if the room had darkened, and she understood that she’d begun to love him for the reassuring incandescence of his smile alone.

- Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

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“True friendship takes us by the hand and reminds us we are not alone on the journey.”

— Unknown

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Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

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Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

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Long years after that day, the Afghan guerrillas I came to know as friends, on a mountain near the siege of Kandahar, talked for hours about Indian films and their favourite Bollywood movie stars.

Indian actors are the greatest in the world, one of them said once, because Indian people know how to shout with their eyes.

The back-street fried-foods cook started at me, with shouting eyes, and stopped me as surely as if he’d pushed a hand into my chest.

I couldn’t move.

In my own eyes, there were words -

I’m sorry, I’m sorry that you have to do this work, I’m sorry that your world, your life, is so hot and dark and unremembered, I’m sorry I’m intruding.

— Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

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What had seemed unimaginably strange and remote from my experience suddenly became possible, and comprehensible, and, finally, fascinating. 

- Gregory David Roberts, Shantaram

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“His paintings establish an architecture of loneliness, reproducing the confining units of office blocks and studio apartments, in which unwitting exhibitionists reveal their private lives in cinematic stills, framed by panes of glass.” - On Edward Hopper, The future of loneliness

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My task is to prove to those people that live in our country that Russian cuisine existed, exists and will exist.

- Vladimir Mukhin

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‎This American Life: 702: One Last Thing Before I Go on Apple Podcasts

‎Show This American Life, Ep 702: One Last Thing Before I Go - 26 Apr 2020

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David Whyte on friendship:

The ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self. The ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone, and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another. To have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

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Grief has its own time frame. It has its own itinerary with you. It has its own power over you, and it will come when it comes.

… It comes when it wants to, and it carves you out. It comes in the middle of the night. It comes in the middle of the day. It comes in the middle of a meeting. It comes in the middle of a meal.

It arrives. It’s this tremendously forceful arrival, and it cannot be resisted without you suffering more …

The posture you take is you hit your knees in absolute humility, and you let it rock you until it’s done with you. It will be done with you eventually, and when it’s done it will leave.

But to stiffen, to resist, to fight it is to hurt yourself.

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One of the greatest fictions of all is to deny the complexity of the world, and to think in absolute terms of pristine purity versus satanic evil.

Yuval Noah Harari

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... in a world in which everything is interconnected, the supreme moral imperative becomes the imperative to know.

- 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

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Never undertake plurality without necessity. - William of Occam