Far from the Tree

 

“Fixing is the illness model; acceptance is the identity model; which way any family goes reflects their assumptions and resources.”

 

 

“Having always imagined myself in a fairly slim minority, I suddenly saw that I was in a vast company. Difference unites us. … The exceptional is ubiquitous; to be entirely typical is the rare and lonely state.”

 

“There is something ironic in prejudice against the disabled and their families, because their plight might befall anybody. Straight men are unlikely to wake up gay one morning, and white children don’t become black; but any of us could be disabled in an instant. People with disabilities make up the largest minority in America; they constitute 15 percent of the population, though only 15 percent of those were born with their disability and about a third are over sixty-five.”

 

“Some people are trapped by the belief that love comes in finite quantities, and that our kind of love exhausts the supply upon which they need to draw. I do not accept competitive models of love, only additive ones.”

***

Pair the book with Andrew Solomon’s incredible TED talk below.

Also, check out what Julia Fierro said about the book in this interview.

NPR: Dana Becker Interview

 

Check out NPR’s interview with Dana Becker, author of One Nation Under Stress, at the following link:

 

‘One Nation Under Stress,’ With To-Do Lists And Yoga For All : NPR.

 

Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity

 

“Good ideas alter the balance in relationships. That is why good ideas are always initially resisted.”

 

“Nobody can tell you if what you’re doing is good, meaningful or worthwhile. The more compelling the path, the more lonely it is. ”

“If you’re creative, if you can think independently, if you can articulate passion, if you can override the fear of being wrong, then your company needs you more than it ever did. And now your company can no longer afford to pretend that isn’t the case. So dust off your horn and start tooting.”

“If your business plan depends on suddenly being ‘discovered’ by some big shot, your plan will probably fail. Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain.”

***

And finally:

***

“Have a story. And make sure it’s a good one. A DAMN good one.”

The Books in My Life

 

“Our whole theory of education is based on the absurd notion that we must learn to swim on land before tackling the water. It applies to the pursuit of the arts as well as to the pursuit of knowledge.”

 

 

“To have undertaken the thankless task of listing all the books I can recall ever reading gives me extreme pleasure and satisfaction. I know of no author who has been mad enough to attempt this. Perhaps my list will give rise to more confusion — but its purpose is not that. Those who know how to read a man know how to read his books.”

***

“A book lying idle on a shelf is wasted ammunition.”

 

Getting Things Done

 

“If you don’t pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.”

 

 

“Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it’s not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I just suggest that you do this weekly instead of yearly.”

 

How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read

 

“Non-reading is not just the absence of reading. It is a genuine activity, one that consists of adopting a stance in relation to the immense tide of books that protects you from drowning. On that basis, it deserves to be defended and even taught.”

 

“Reading is not just acquainting ourselves with a text or acquiring knowledge; it is also, from its first moments, an inevitable process of forgetting.”

***

“If a book is less a book than it is the whole of the discussion about it, we must pay attention to that discussion in order to talk about the book without reading it. For it is not the book itself that is at stake, but what it has become within the critical space in which it intervenes and is continually transformed.”

Thinking, Fast and Slow

 

“I have always believed that scientific research is another domain where a form of optimism is essential to success: I have yet to meet a successful scientist who lacks the ability to exaggerate the importance of what he or she is doing, and I believe that someone who lacks a delusional sense of significance will wilt in the face of repeated experiences of multiple small failures and rare successes, the fate of most researchers.”

 

 

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”

 

My Ideal Bookshelf

 

“The thing about this bookshelf is that each of these books is a vast experience unto itself, while also being both self-contained and superbly useless…It’s like taking a long walk with a friend who’s got a lot to say. There’s no cumulative purpose to it — it’s just an excellent way to waste your life.”

~Jonathan Lethem

 

 

“In the end, the one element that links all the ideal bookshelves … is the never-ending search. We’re all still hunting, still hoping to discover one more book that we’ll love and treasure for the rest of our lives.”

~Thessaly La Force

 

Video: How and Why We Read

 

“Reading is always an act of empathy.”

 

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong

 

“It would be better not to know so many things than to know so many things that are not so.”

~Josh Billings