Contrapposto by Dave Eggers, r. Aug. 2026

Page 8 Cricket thought he might go outside and fill the can from the hose, but it was January, no more than ten degrees outside, the sky frozen and white, the trees terrified and bare.

Page 10 “You are contained,” Silas said. “You can visit with your mother, or spend time with me. Or you can go into the world outside and look at its endlessness. And always you have the life you can conjure on your own. You can produce beauty there in your notebooks, from scratch. And harmony. Chaos outside, order on your paper. Right?”

Page 15 Cricket looked at her and thought he recognized her. A grade above was another world. He saw those kids as he saw adults, teachers, cops. But she did look familiar. The boy, though, he didn’t know. He might be from out of town, a far more dangerous category of teenager. A teenager from out of town was capable of anything—even murder.

Page 28 But he circled and ovaled for a minute or so, and though his lines were more tentative and did not have Oana’s flourish and accuracy, in the end he created a general shape not unlike hers. He blinked rapidly at his drawing. It was, already, unlike anything he’d ever done. It was much like hers, and it was like the objects in front of him, and yet it was somehow his.

Page 36 He convulsed, and she massaged his head with her hands, round and round like a planetary storm.

Page 52 Jed had been held back, then kicked out and now attended the Boys Academy, a gloomy campus on the edge of town where the most wayward and unpromising young men went. Jed’s father was a cop.

Page 94 “I’m really glad you could come today,” she said, and put her hand on his. It was very warm and his childhood ended. Now he was a young man who women touched suggestively at the track.

Page 96 He closed his book, reshelved it and left the library through the side door. The door boomed when he opened it and whispered when it closed.

Page 96 Outside, the air was cold and crisp and hit him like love. The ancient trees stood over him, nodding in quiet tribute. When he got back to work, the Whistlestop smelled of cigarette smoke and snow. Jed was sitting at one of the dinettes with a woman of about twenty-two.

Page 135 He drew the log truthfully and stayed until dark. When he was finished he examined his work, feeling like the day could not have been spent in any better way. The day was gone but the drawing would remain. Art was remembering, documenting. Spending a day recording a day and thus freezing time.

Page 157 ...and the surfaces were alive, were untamed and varied and rewarded close inspection.

Page 166 “I recognize that many among you are not draftsmen. You are not interested in rendering the world as you see it. That is fine. The art world, in the last century, has made room for those who cannot draw. But I would ask that you, that we, resist a new, paradoxical tyranny wherein those without technical skill terrorize those who possess it. When we hound certain kinds of artists out of this school—hound out the most naturally and classically skilled, lord help us!—we engage in a kind of upside-down artistic fascism that reminds me of Pol Pot purging his country of intellectuals.”

Page 168 “Beauty justifies itself!” Carpenter yelled. “There is a perfectly inverse relationship between talent and the need to explain itself. The artist’s only rational response to ‘Why did you make this?’ is ‘Because I wanted to’ or ‘Because it felt right.’ Everything else is sophistry!”

Page 168 You have been fed the lie that intent is achievement. It is not. You have been fed the lie that explaining your ideas is the same as realizing them. It is not. You have been fed the lie that people enjoy looking at theories and gags and pranks. They do not. You have been fed the lie that your peers’ success means your failure. It is not. You have been fed the lie that greatness emerges from cruelty. This has never been true and never will be true. These group crits have no purpose and accomplish nothing. They kill the heroes and reward the scavengers. They must end.”

Page 178 As professors, they’re forced to talk, which leads to pronouncements, which lead to theories, and theories become rigid and quickly ridiculous.”

Page 189 And I had an anthropologist friend—he’d studied people all over the world for fifty years. He said the happiest people, in every society and every era, were those who created things, but without ambition. The people who make belts, vases, toys. You bring something new into the world, like a god, but without the human need to be recognized for it. Is that happiness?”

Page 244 The idea of creation was delicious, pure pleasure, while the execution of that idea was so often an unendurable slog ending in tragic disappointment. So rarely could he realize the image in his mind, and even if he could, what would he do with it? Show it in an empty gallery next to the work of Peter-James Flemming?

Page 247 Shit, what if that happens to us? Every day in art should be like running down a hill, arms waving, shrieking. Not sitting at a desk writing down auction prices. Are they nice to you at least?”

Page 253 “And I haven’t done anything yet. At thirty everyone judges you, right? You need something to have happened before thirty. Otherwise you’re late and worthless and all is lost.”

Page 276 When we create well, the world is good, he thought. We’ve wrestled amorphous ideas into knowable shapes, we’ve improved—even glorified—flesh on canvas, we’ve made something greater than ourselves.

Page 343 But rarely did anything go to plan, and it was even rarer to have a work of art received as hoped. And so what was left? What was left, what was the only refuge, was the simple joy in creation. In making something appear. But Kyle was not joyful. And Olympia was not joyful. And the workers in the studio were there to pay for their lives outside the studio. And the billionaires who bought Kyle’s work were investors, not lovers. So together, everyone involved, from Cricket on up—they were all engaged in a kind of factory that made beautiful, unnecessary things that meant very little to anyone who made them.

Page 360 She was a muscular, angular being—a practical person

Page 369 It was only in seeing friends, also on their joined journey of decline, that he saw aging’s wretched work.

Page 381 God, look at this. What do you think: Is there just enough beauty in the world, or too much? You have only two choices.” “Too much,” he said. “Good answer,” she said, and stood in the water, motionless for a long while.

Page 409 The quiet and sacred world of now that he’d tended had been punctured, and the past was rushing through, filling the room.

Page 413 “And yet it didn’t matter,” she said. “All these things we did, if only we knew how little any one of them mattered. You could do a thousand things in a life.”

Atomic Habits by James Clear, r. Dec. 2024

 p. 18 Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. You get what you repeat.

p. 33 The ultimate form of intrinsic motivation is when a habit becomes part of your identity. It's one thing to say I'm the type of person who wants this. It's something very different to say I'm the type of person who is this.

p. 38 Every time you choose to perform a bad habit, it's a vote for that identity. The good news is that you don't need to be perfect. In any election, there are going to be votes for both sides. You don't need a unanimous vote to win an election; you just need a majority. It doesn't matter if you cast a few votes for a bad behavior or an unproductive habit. Your goal is simply to win the majority of the time.

p. 87 Stop thinking about your environment as filled with objects. Start thinking about it as filled with relationships. Think in terms of how you interact with the spaces around you.

p. 92 Instead, "disciplined" people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations. The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need to use it the least. It's easier to practice self-restraint when you don't have to use it very often. So, yes, perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.

p. 121 The human mind knows how to get along with others. It wants to get along with others. This is our natural mode. You can override it – you can choose to ignore the group or to stop caring what other people think – but it takes work. Running against the grain of your culture requires extra effort. When changing your habits means challenging the tribe, change is unattractive. When changing your habits means fitting in with the tribe, change is very attractive.

p. 130 Even the tiniest action is tinged with the motivation to feel differently than you do in the moment. When you binge-eat or light up or browse social media, what you really want is not a potato chip or a cigarette or a bunch of likes. What you really want is to feel different.

p. 163 People often think it's weird to get hyped about reading one page or meditating for one minute or making one sales call. But the point is not to do one thing. The point is to master the habit of showing up.

p. 164 The more you ritualize the beginning of a process, the more likely it becomes that you can slip into the state of deep focus that is required to do great things.

p. 165 Nearly everyone can benefit from getting their thoughts out of their head and onto paper, but most people give up after a few days or avoid it entirely because journaling feels like a chore. The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work. Greg McKeown, a leadership consultant from the United Kingdom, built a daily journaling habit by specifically writing less than he felt like. He always stopped journaling before it seemed like a hassle. Ernest Hemingway believed in similar advice for any kind of writing. "The best way is to always stop when you are going good," he said.

p. 174 When the effort required to act on your desires becomes effectively zero, you can find yourself slipping into whatever impulse arises at the moment. The downside of automation is that we can find ourselves jumping from easy task to easy task without making time for more difficult, but ultimately more rewarding, work.

p. 192 Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.

p. 201 Whenever this happens to me, I try to remind myself of a simple rule: never miss twice.... Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.... Lost days hurt you more than successful days help you.... "The first rule of compounding: Never interrupt it unnecessarily...." This is why the "bad" workouts are often the most important ones.... Don't put up a zero. Don't let losses eat into your compounding.

p. 235 Variable rewards or not, no habit will stay interesting forever. At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self-improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.

P. 249 Habits deliver numerous benefits, but the downside is that they can lock us into our previous patterns of thinking and acting – even when the world is shifting around us. Everything is impermanent. Life is constantly changing, so you need to periodically check in to see if your old habits and beliefs are still serving you.

p. 252 Success in not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.

p. 259 Happiness is simply the absence of desire.

p. 261 Being curious is better than being smart. Being motivated and curious counts for more than being smart because it leads to action.

Same As Ever by Morgan Housel, r. Oct. 2024

Location 149 I cannot tell you what businesses will dominate the next decade. But I can tell you how business leaders let success go to their heads, becoming lazy and entitled and eventually losing their edge. That story hasn’t changed in hundreds of years and never will.

Location 292 this book’s premise—to base predictions on how people behave rather than on specific events. Predicting what the world will look like fifty years from now is impossible. But predicting that people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations, and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I’d take.

Location 354 Put another way: There is rarely more or less economic uncertainty; just changes in how ignorant people are to potential risks. Asking what the biggest risks are is like asking what you expect to be surprised about.

Location 434 Montesquieu wrote 275 years ago, “If you only wished to be happy, this could be easily accomplished; but we wish to be happier than other people, and this is always difficult, for we believe others to be happier than they are.”

Location 457 Median family income adjusted for inflation was $29,000 in 1955. In 1965 it was $42,000. In 2021 it was $70,784.

Location 543 Peter Kaufman, CEO of Glenair and one of the smartest people you will ever come across, once wrote: We tend to take every precaution to safeguard our material possessions because we know what they cost. But at the same time we neglect things which are much more precious because they don’t come with price tags attached: The real value of things like our eyesight or relationships or freedom can be hidden to us, because money is not changing hands.

Location 630 Something I’ve long thought true, and which shows up constantly when you look for it, is that people who are abnormally good at one thing tend to be abnormally bad at something else. It’s as if the brain has capacity for only so much knowledge and emotion, and an abnormal skill robs bandwidth from other parts of someone’s personality. Take Elon Musk.

Location 655 Reversion to the mean is one of the most common stories in history. It’s the main character in economies, markets, countries, companies, careers—everything. Part of the reason it happens is because the same personality traits that push people to the top also increase the odds of pushing them over the edge.

Location 764 The decline of local news has all kinds of implications. One that doesn’t get much attention is that the wider the news becomes the more likely it is to be pessimistic.

Location 797 The inability to forecast the past has no impact on our desire to forecast the future. Certainty is so valuable that we’ll never give up the quest for it, and most people couldn’t get out of bed in the morning if they were honest about how uncertain the future is.

Location 862 Even within a good story, a powerful phrase or sentence can do most of the work. There is a saying that people don’t remember books; they remember sentences.

Location 909 In a perfect world, the importance of information wouldn’t rely on its author’s eloquence. But we live in a world where people are bored, impatient, emotional, and need complicated things distilled into easy-to-grasp scenes. If you look, I think you’ll find that wherever information is exchanged—wherever there are products, companies, careers, politics, knowledge, education, and culture—the best story wins.

Location 924 Mark Twain said, “Humor is a way to show you’re smart without bragging.”

Location 939 Poet Ralph Hodgson put this well when he said, “Some things have to be believed to be seen.” Poor evidence can be a very compelling story if that story scratches an itch

Location 1051 Every investment price, every market valuation, is just a number from today multiplied by a story about tomorrow.

Location 1079 The ones who thrive long term are those who understand the real world is a never-ending chain of absurdity, confusion, messy relationships, and imperfect people.

Location 1093 Author Robert Greene once wrote, “The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces.”

Location 1188 A common irony goes like this: • Paranoia leads to success because it keeps you on your toes. • But paranoia is stressful, so you abandon it quickly once you achieve success. • Now you’ve abandoned what made you successful and you begin to decline—which is even more stressful. It happens in business, investing, careers, relationships—all over the place.

Location 1212 Jerry Seinfeld had the most popular show on TV. Then he quit. He later said the reason he killed his show while it was thriving was because the only way to know where the top is, is to experience the decline, which he had no interest in doing. Maybe the show could keep rising, maybe it couldn’t. He was fine not knowing the answer.

Location 1321 “You might well expect a machine built in haste to fail quicker than one put together carefully and methodically, and our study suggests that this may be true for bodies too,” Neil Metcalfe, one of the researchers, said.

Location 1502 A carefree and stress-free life sounds wonderful only until you recognize the motivation and progress it prevents. No one cheers for hardship—nor should they—but we should recognize that it’s the most potent fuel of problem-solving, serving as both the root of what we enjoy today and the seed of opportunity for what we’ll enjoy tomorrow.

Location 1568 Good news is the deaths that didn’t take place, the diseases you didn’t get, the wars that never happened, the tragedies avoided, and the injustices prevented. That’s hard for people to contextualize or even imagine, let alone measure. But bad news is visible. More than visible, it’s in your face. It’s the terrorist attack, the war, the car accident, the pandemic, the stock market crash, and the political battle you can’t look away from.

Location 1773 But Tversky’s point is that if your job is to be creative and think through tough problems, then time spent wandering around a park or aimlessly lounging on a couch might be your most valuable hours. A little inefficiency is wonderful.

Location 1805 A lot of thought jobs basically never stop, and without structuring time to think and be curious, you wind up less efficient during the hours that are devoted to sitting at your desk cranking out work. This is the opposite of the concept of “hustle porn,” where people want to look busy at all times because they think it’s noble. Nassim Taleb says, “My only measure of success is how much time you have to kill.” More than a measure of success, I think it’s a key ingredient. The most efficient calendar in the world—one where every minute is packed with productivity—comes at the expense of curious wandering and uninterrupted thinking, which eventually become the biggest contributors to success.

Location 1864 A coworker of mine at an old employer once hired a social media consultant. During a three-hour session, the consultant walked us through hashtags, what time of day you should post on Twitter, how threading posts increases engagement, and a slew of other hacks. He was nice. But he never mentioned the most effective social media trick: write good stuff that people want to read. That’s because writing good stuff isn’t a hack. It’s hard. It takes time and creativity. It can’t be manufactured. It works, with a near 100 percent success rate. But it is the social media equivalent of a heavy workout. Same goes for diets, finances, marketing . . . everyone wants a shortcut. It’s always been this way, but I suspect it’s getting worse as technology inflates our benchmark for how fast results should happen.

Location 1882 Harvard Business Review once pointed out to Jerry Seinfeld that part of the reason he ended his show was writer burnout. The magazine asked if he and show cocreator Larry David could have avoided burnout and kept the show going if they used a consulting company like McKinsey to create a more efficient writing process. Seinfeld asked if McKinsey is funny. No, the magazine said. “Then I don’t need them,” he said. “If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The show was successful because I micromanaged it—every word, every line, every take, every edit, every casting.” If you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way.

Location 1911 If you recognize that inefficiency—“bullshit,” as Pressfield puts it—is ubiquitous, then the question is not “How can I avoid all of it?” but “What is the optimal amount to put up with so I can still function in a messy and imperfect world?”

Location 2099 Facebook similarly began as a way for college students to share pictures of their drunk weekends, and within a decade it was the most powerful lever in global politics. Again, it’s just impossible to connect those dots with foresight.

Location 2121 The same thing happens in careers, when someone with a few mediocre skills mixed together at the right time becomes multiple times more successful than someone who’s an expert in one thing.

Location 2138 The window-dressed version of ourselves is by far the most common. There’s a saying—I don’t know whose—that an expert is always from out of town. It’s similar to the Bible verse that says no man is a prophet in his own country. That one has deeper meaning, but they both get across an important point: It’s easiest to convince people that you’re special if they don’t know you well enough to see all the ways you’re not. Keep that in mind when comparing your career, business, and life to those of others.

Location 2333 Chris Rock once joked about who actually teaches kids in school: “Teachers do one half, bullies do the other,” he said. “And learning how to deal with bullies is the half you’ll actually use as a grown-up.” It’s real experience with risk and uncertainty, which is something you cannot fathom until you’ve experienced it firsthand.

Location 2353 Future fortunes are imagined in a vacuum, but reality is always lived with the good and bad taken together, competing for attention.

Location 2408 Another point about long-term thinking is how it sways the information we consume. I try to ask when I’m reading: Will I care about this a year from now? Ten years from now? Eighty years from now? It’s fine if the answer is no, even a lot of the time. But if you’re honest with yourself you may begin to steer toward the more enduring bits of information. There are two types of information: permanent and expiring. Permanent information is: “How do people behave when they encounter a risk they hadn’t fathomed?” Expiring information is: “How much profit did Microsoft earn in the second quarter of 2005?”

Location 2423 The point, then, isn’t that you should read less news and more books. It’s that if you read good books you’ll have an easier time understanding what you should or shouldn’t pay attention to in the news.

Location 2474 In finance, spending less than you make, saving the difference, and being patient is perhaps 90 percent of what you need to know to do well. But what’s taught in college? How to price derivatives and calculate net present value. In health it’s sleep eight hours, move a lot, eat real food, but not too much. But what’s popular? Supplements, hacks, and pills. Mark Twain said kids provide the most interesting information, “for they tell all they know and then they stop.” Adults tend to lose this skill.

Location 2534 So most debates are not actual disagreements; they’re people with different experiences talking over each other.