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Notes on a Nervous Planet QUOTES

Notes on a Nervous Planet QUOTES

1 " Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything it is because we are dangerously near to wanting nothing.’ —Sylvia Plath "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

2 " The craving for the thing is rarely met by the satisfaction of getting it. And so we crave more. And the cycle repeats. We are encouraged to want what will only make us want more.

We are, in short, encouraged to be addicts. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

3 " All of our earthly concerns are quite transient compared to the sky. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

4 " There may be no visible threat and yet you can feel utterly terrified. It's all intense suspense, no action. It's like Jaws without the shark. But often there are sharks. Metaphorical, invisible sharks.. Maybe we would cope with the world better if we knew where those sharks were. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

5 " Books might be one way to recover some space. Stories. Fiction. When I was eleven, friendless, struggling to fit in at school, I read The outsiders and Rumble Fish and Tex by S.E. Hinton, and I suddenly had friends again. Her books were friends.. And the stories they inhabited could be places I could hide inside. And feel safe. In a world that can get too much, a world where we are running out of mind space, fictional worlds are essential. They can be an escape from reality. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

6 " Happiness is not good for the economy.
We are encouraged, continually, to be a little bit dissatisfied with ourselves. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

7 " there has never been such a plethora of advice on looking good. We are constantly bombarded with diet books,.. and there are ever more digital apps and filters to enhance what the products can't. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

8 " When normality becomes madness, the only way to find sanity is by daring to be different. Or daring to be the you that exists beyond all the physical clutter and mind debris of modern existence. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

9 " So, as physical health and mental health are intertwined, couldn’t the same be said about the modern world? Couldn’t aspects of how we live in the modern world be responsible for how we feel in the modern world? "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

10 " I stared at the tweet I was about to post. It wasn't going to add anything to my life. Or anyone else's life. It was just going to lead to more checking of my phone, like Pepys with his pocket watch. I pressed delete, and felt a strange relief as I watch each letter disappear. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

11 " Progress,' wrote C.S. Lewis, 'means getting nearer to the place you want to be. And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.' This is a phenomenally good way of looking at it, I think. Forward momentum, on an individual or social level, is not automatically good simply because it is forward momentum. Sometimes we push our lives in the wrong direction. If we feel it is making ourselves unhappy, progress might mean doing an about-turn and walking back to the right road. But we must never feel - personally or s a culture, that only one version of the future is inevitable.
The future is ours to shape. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

12 " The problem is homelessness not houselessness. When you are homeless you are missing more than just a bedroom. He added that working there made him realize what people really need in life.. After I spoke about my experience of mental health problems with them, I got to talk to the man sitting next to me. He was about my age. He looked like he'd been through a lot, mentally and psychically, but he was smiling. He said he'd become homeless after his relationship had broke down and he'd fallen into a depression that he'd tried to deny.. He told me that the center had saved his life. He pointed vaguely to the door and told me that 'out there' life didn't make sense. He got lost in it. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

13 " As bibliotecas, por exemplo, são espaços maravilhosos que, atualmente, correm perigo de vida. Muitas pessoas com responsabilidades políticas pensam que as bibliotecas são obsoletas nesta era da Internet. O que está longe de ser verdade. Muitas estão a usar a Internet de forma inovadora, quer no acesso aos livros quer no acesso à própria Internet. Além disso, as bibliotecas não têm que ver só com os livros. Representam um dos poucos espaços públicos que não preferem a carteira ao dono da carteira. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

14 " I sometimes feel like my head is a computer with too many windows open. Too much clutter on the desktop. There is a metaphorical spinning rainbow wheel inside me. Disabling me. And if only I could find a way to switch off some of the frames, if only I could drag some of the clutter into the trash, then I would be fine. But which frame would I choose, when they all seem so essential? How can I stop my mind being overloaded when the world is overloaded? We can think about anything. And so it makes sense that we end up thinking about everything. We might have to, sometimes, be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

15 " To enjoy life, we might have to stop thinking about what we will never be able to read and watch and say and do, and start to think of how to enjoy the world within our boundaries. To live on a human scale. To focus on the few things we can do, rather than the millions of things we can't. To not crave parallel lives. To find a smaller mathematics. To be a proud and singular one. An indivisible prime. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

16 " Be a mystery, not a demographic. Be someone a computer could never quite know. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

17 " Life can sometimes feel like an overproduced song, with a cacophony of a hundred instruments playing all at once. Sometimes the song sounds better stripped back to just a guitar and a voice. Sometimes, when a song has too much happening, it's hard to hear the song at all. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

18 " It might be a strange irony that the cure for worrying about ageing is sometimes, well, ageing. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

19 " When it comes to our minds, awareness is very often the solution itself. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet

20 " All through our education we are being taught a kind of reverse mindfulness. A kind of Future Studies where- via the guise of mathematics, or literature, or history, or computer programming, or French- we are being taught to think of a time different to the time we are in. Exam time. Job time. When-we-are-grown-up time.
To see the act of learning as something not for its own sake but because of what it will get you reduces the wonder of humanity. We are thinking, feeling, art-making, knowledge-hungry, marvelous animals, who understand ourselves and our world through the act of learning. It is an end in itself. It has far more to offer than the things it lets us write on application forms. It is a way to love living right now. "

― , Notes on a Nervous Planet