"Lastly, and I know it sounds like an excuse but neither you nor I nor anyone can ever really know whether a story is happy or tragic."

"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." — Nick Carraway

"Even if we are sad and suffering in the face of misfortunes, let's learn to live with those uncomfortable truths. I wish for you to live well not because our weariness means nothing or because everybody else lives that way, but because your life is the most precious thing to you. I sincerely wish you to live well."

”For if disaster and oblivion have followed this painting down through time--so too has love. Insofar as it is immortal (and it is) I have a small, bright, immutable part in that immortality. It exists; and it keeps on existing. And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next.”

“I want love to conquer all. But love can't conquer anything. It can't do anything on it's own. It relies on us to do the conquering on its behalf.”

“She was a story, not an epilogue.”

“This isn’t a place for lies or pretending everything is all right. We know everything is not all right. If it were, you wouldn’t be here.”

“Because hope is a knife that can cut through the foundations of the world. Hope hurts. That’s what you need to learn, and fast, if you don’t want it to cut you open from the inside out. Hope is bad. Hope means you keep on holding to things that won’t ever be so again, and so you bleed an inch at a time until there’s nothing left.”

“They want the world to be exactly the way it was before their children went away on these life-changing adventures, and when the world doesn’t oblige, they try to force it into the boxes they build for us.”

“It gets better. It never gets easy, but it does start to hurt a little less”

“For us, the places we went were home. We didn’t care if they were good or evil or neutral or what. We cared about the fact that for the first time, we didn’t have to pretend to be something we weren’t. We just got to be. That made all the difference in the world”

“We don’t teach you how to dwell. We also don’t teach you how to forget. We teach you how to move on.”

“Old enough to know what I’m losing in the process of being found”

“Their love wanted to fix her, and refused to see that she wasn’t broken.”

“There was peace in stillness, a serenity that couldn’t be found anywhere else in this hot, fast, often terrible world.”

“That was her real story. Finding a place where she could be free. That’s your story, too, every one of you.”

“You found freedom, if only for a moment, and when you lost it, you came here, hoping it could be found again.”

“This world is unforgiving and cruel to those it judges as even the slightest bit outside the norm. If anyone should be kind, understanding, accepting, loving to their fellow outcasts, it’s you.”

“Why is your happy-ever-after the only one that matters?”

“You’re nobody’s doorway but your own, and the only one who gets to tell you how your story ends is you.”

"Sa huli, natatagpuan ang pag-ibig sa oras na natuto tayong humingi ng tawad, magpatawad, at tanggapin ang ating mga naging pagkakamali."

"Iyon ang tunay na paraiso... ang pusong may kapatawaran at pag-ibig." 

"From what I understood, love was an extreme idea. A word that seemed to force something undefinable into the prison of letters. But the word was used so easily, so often. People spoke of love so casually, just to mean the slightest pleasure or thanks."

"People shut their eyes to a distant tragedy saying there’s nothing they could do, yet they didn’t stand up for one happening nearby either because they’re too terrified. Most people could feel but didn’t act. They said they sympathized, but easily forgot. The way I see it, that was not real. I didn’t want to live like that.”

“I've decided to confront it. Confront whatever life throws at me, as I always have. However much I can feel, nothing more, nothing less.”

“What does love mean?” Mom asked mischievously. “To discover beauty.”

“Lastly, and I know it sounds like an excuse, but neither you nor I nor anyone can ever really know whether a story is happy or tragic.”

“Once you repeat the same word over and over, there comes a time when its meaning fades.”

"It is only in the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye."

"I believe that the following would be the true way to Paradise — learn the way to Hell in order to flee from it."

"Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of few perceives what has been carefully hidden in the recesses of the mind."
~ Phaedrus

“Do you know what it’s like to like someone so much you can’t stand it and know that they’ll never feel the same way?”

"You pounce upon the happy moments, you hold them up as proof — even though that one moment cannot compensate for all the other moments, the majority of moments. See? This is why it’s worth living. This is why I’ve been making him try."

• The Toaster Project was when one man tried to build a toaster from scratch and realized the insane levels of complexity required.
• Our world is stunningly complex, but we are so engulfed in this complexity that we take it for granted. We are blind to it.
• We overestimate the impact any one person or leader can have because we fail to see how complex the problems are that current leaders face.
• The system we live in is far too complex for any one person to understand. Even developing expertise in a particular area isn't as useful as you would expect because of the interrelatedness of things with my areas you know nothing about.
• Failure is everywhere. Ten percent of American companies disappear every year.
• Perhaps the reason companies don't stay at the top is simply because the only way to go is down. It's really hard to stay at the top and perhaps being a Fortune 100 company relies on many factors outside your control and not simply running a good company. When those factors change, so does your incredible success.
• The market fumbles its way to success. The good ideas take off and less successful ones die out. It's like evolution for economics.
• Avoid survivorship bias. Don't just see success. See all the failures that led to the eventual success.
• The process of evolution strikes a balance between discovering the new and exploiting the familiar.
• The evolutionary mix of small steps and occasional wild gambles is the best possible way to search for solutions.
• Evolution produces ongoing “works for now” solutions and then builds upon those ideas.
• We are more blind than we think.
• Most real-world problems are more complex than we think.
• Seek out new ideas and try new things.
• When trying something new, do it on a scale where failure is survivable.
• Seek out feedback and learn from your mistakes as you go along.
• For some reason, we are obsessed with achieving uniformly high standards in industry even though it is precisely the opposite (variation and selection) that got us this far in the first place. In fact, if, for example, every hospital did things the same way, we would struggle to improve because nobody would test new ideas.
• There is a limit to how much honest feedback most leaders want to hear.
• Accepting trial and error means accepting error. And human brains don't seem to be very good at doing that.
• “A person who has not made peace with his losses is likely to accept gambles that would be unacceptable to him otherwise.” -Kahneman and Tversky
• John Endler's guppy studies from the 1970s showcase how environment drives evolution.
• Make sure you know when you've failed. Measure your progress.
• Measurement can come in many forms. For example, Whole Foods requires new employees to do a four week trial period and they are only hired if they earn positive votes from 2/3 of their coworkers. This is a form of peer monitoring (or we could call it peer measurement).
• Google's 20 percent time is another example of peer monitoring because good side projects will gain the interest of peers.
• In a company where your peers decide who stays around, there is no room for people who don't pull their weight.
• 80 percent of Google's projects will fail, but that doesn't matter. People only remember the 20 percent that succeed.
• “Success is the number of experiments that can be crammed into 24 hours.”
• Formal theory won't get you nearly as far as an incredibly rapid systematic process of trial and error.
• Niche products grow and usurp incumbents precisely because they appeal only to a few users and seem inferior to incumbents. They get ignored long enough to grow into a serious threat.
• Fascinating reason new ideas get sabotaged within organizations: if new business models catch on they often require people with new skills and that means any big wig in the current business will lose status. So they consciously or unconsciously sabotage new ideas because they are inherently threatening to the career they have spent years building. Yet another reason you must be constantly willing to reinvent yourself.
• If you're going to fail in public, best to do it in front of a limited audience. You need a relatively safe space to fail.
• Hedonic editing is a way of avoiding thinking about losses and mistakes by convincing ourselves they aren't that bad.
• The three obstacles that prevent us from learning from our mistakes are 1) denial, 2) self-destructive behavior, 3) remembering past mistakes as triumphs.
• Our response to failure should be, “I am not a failure, but I have made a mistake.”

Falling asleep is such a strange feeling. It's like a carp or an eel is tugging on a fishing line, or something heavy like a lead weight is pulling on the line that I'm holding with my head, and as I doze off to sleep, the line slackens up a bit. When that happens, it startles me back to awareness. Then it pulls me again. I doze off to sleep. The line loosens a bit again. This goes on three or four times, and then, with the first really big tug, this time it lasts until morning.

Feeling strangely embarrassed and happy, I got up and hastily folded up my bedding. As I hoisted it, I was startled to hear myself exclaim, Alley-oop! I have never thought that I was the kind of girl who would utter such an unrefined expression as "Alley-oop." It seems like the kind of thing an old lady would shout—"Alley-oop!" It's disgusting. Why would I have said such a thing?

... but anyway I wanted to walk along with the nice umbrella that Mother gave to me yesterday, so I took it with me. Mother used this parasol long ago, when she first got married. I felt quite proud for finding this interesting umbrella. When I carried this one, it made me feel like strolling through the streets of Paris... In reality, it was just an odd, tattered umbrella with a spindly handle. I really am miserable and pathetic. Like the little match girl.

I  want to live beautifully.

Tomorrow will probably be another day like today. Happiness will never come my way. I know that. But it's probably best to go to sleep believing that it will surely come, tomorrow it will come. 

Father, the sunset afterglow is beautiful. And the evening haze is pink. See how the rays from the setting sun melt and blur into the haze, which is why it takes on such a soft pink glow. The pink haze drifts and sways amongst the grove of trees, trailing above the road and caressing the meadow, before gently enveloping my body. It infuses every last strand of my hair with its soft pink light and then lightly embraces me. But this sky is even more beautiful. For the first time in my life, I want to bow my head to the heavens. Now I believe in God. The color of this sky, what would you call it? Rose? Flame? Iridescent? The color of angel's wings? Or a huge temple? No, it is none of these things. It is much more sublime.

'Be yourself', they say but they will mock you, judge you and criticize your ways. Society is full of hypocrites. Well, we don't care.

"You're so scared of failure
 You're so scared to fail 
 That you fear to live true."

Knowledge is power is time is money.

Marriage is supposed to be a union between two equals who love and support each other, not a master-slave relationship in which the man commands a docile woman.

The world is a heavy thing to bear, whether at the center or elsewhere. Why won't you let someone help you? 

“Fear means you’re trying to move toward something you love, but your old beliefs, or unhealed experiences, are getting in the way.” -Brianna Wiest, 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think