Book: Crime and Punishment “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment Book: Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop “<..> Reading makes you see with clearer eyes and understand the world better. When you do that , you become stronger - the feeling you associate with success. But at the same time with pain. Within the pages, there’s much suffering, beyond that we’ve gone through in our finite experience of life. You’ll read about suffering you didn’t know existed. Having experienced their pain through words, it becomes a lot harder to focus on pursuing individual happiness and success. Reading makes you deviate further from the textbook definition of success because books don’t make us go ahead of or above anyone else; they guide us to stand alongside others. <…> ...

For one human being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks… the work for which all other work is but preparation."

Her story was told by her paintings.

“Here’s all you have to know about men and women: women are crazy, men are stupid. And the main reason women are crazy is that men are stupid.” “The reason I talk to myself is because I’m the only one whose answers I accept.” “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?” “Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.” ...

The alternative is no longer between good and evil, but between murder and murder. — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Fiction, like all art, is primarily an emotional endeavour, and it succeeds or fails on the basis of its emotional sense. The past is a canon we are all entangled with. Whether we know it or not, our combined human history is the reference we all share, and it is emotionally complex beyond any corpus of texts imaginable. Of course structural powers and systemic forces matter, of course political systems and expediencies matter, but power is concentrated in individuals, and individuals have emotional histories. ...

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. – Joan Didion Without history, we are always children of time. Also our memory is very tricky.

Shoveling Snow With Buddha Billy Collins In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok you would never see him doing such a thing, tossing the dry snow over a mountain of his bare, round shoulder, his hair tied in a knot, a model of concentration. Sitting is more his speed, if that is the word for what he does, or does not do. Even the season is wrong for him. In all his manifestations, is it not warm or slightly humid? Is this not implied by his serene expression, that smile so wide it wraps itself around the waist of the universe? ...

“Happiness is not something to be pursued, it is something met, an encounter. Most encounters, however, have a sequel; this is their promise. The encounter with happiness has no sequel. All is there instantly. Happiness is what pierces grief.” ―- John Berger

From the start of COVID-19 pandemic, there are a lot of things happened. Wars are still raging including both Ukraine and Gaza. BLM protests around the world happend after George Floyd was choked to death. During this period, many notable leftists turned right. It is like a deconstruction process. Then I start to read James Baldwin and Hannah Arendt like unlearning or deprogramming. Just imagine that you had lived and grown in a different place or time, read different books, you might have different expereinces and beliefs. You might convince yourself that your current worldviews are correct. Now the question is that how we know what we know is correct and other people are not? If everyone had a firm stand in his or her views, how are we going to resolve the conflicts among us? So regardless of our difference, we must have an open mind. “The mind is like an umbrella. It’s most useful when open.” ...