Flesh by David Szalay, r. Feb. 2026

p. 128 "So you need to fit in. You need to fit in with everything else in their lives. That's what they want. They're people with serious money and they want someone who fits in with everything else in their lives."

p. 83 He realizes that the thing that are so important to him – the things that happened, and that he saw there, the things that left him feeling that nothing would ever be the same again – they just aren't important here. [as he looks out the window of the train, dusk becoming night and thus his own reflection, leaving the war in the Middle East and heading back home]

p. ??? Without that hour in the afternoon to look forward to, there is nothing to give the days any sense of purpose or meaning.

p. 162 There are those London summer days when summer seems muffled somehow, when a cool, humid grayness hangs in the park as he runs. Statues hold their positions.

p. 172 He lies there for another minute or two against the pillows, looking at the ceiling, which is discreetly studded with smoke detectors and other things, and wondering what will happen now.

p. 214 The difference is maybe that when he’s drunk he doesn’t care that he’s disconnected from things, it doesn’t seem to be a problem, whereas when he’s stoned it somehow does.

p. 256 On Christmas Eve he meets some Oxford friends for lunch in London. Afterward they go to a pub in Knightsbridge with an open fire. It’s one of those winter afternoon drinking sessions that merge into evening in a way that’s almost imperceptible as it’s happening. It’s just suddenly nine o’clock.

p. 278 There’s the distinctive quiet that follows the end of one of these [video calls], the restoration of a solitude that was anyway only partly dispelled by the presence of someone else on the laptop screen.

p. 289 The idea that his son is afraid of something, that he’s suffering in some way, and that there’s not much he can do about it is very hard for him to deal with. It’s just very painful to think about.

Magic Pill by Johann Hari, r. Aug. 2024

p. 56 Uncomfortably, I asked myself: Do you have this psychological objection to these drugs because, at some level, you believe that obese people don't deserve to be healthy? This led me to confront something deeper in my psyche. If I am totally honest, at some level, I believed that by taking these drugs, I was cheating. You should get to weight loss through hard work-diet and exercise. Just being jabbed once a week is too easy. I felt slightly ashamed.

p. 93 As we have grown fatter over the past forty years, we have been sold three different tools for weight loss. The first two are offered to us explicitly, while the third is only offered implicitly. They are exercise, diet, and stigma. The recipe for weight loss, we are taught, is simple: eat less, move more, and feel bad about yourself if you don't.

p. 125 Most people taking these drugs say that it changes how they think, and seems to have a profound effect on their brains. They find that the foods they have craved, and obsessed over, suddenly seem less rewarding. The "food chatter" that dominated their thinking dies down. To many of them, it feels much more like an effect in their skulls than on their guts.

p. 166 [Eve Ensler] told me that, as a close friend, she had been worried for a long time that I had an underlying problem, and my poor diet was only a symptom of it. She said I was deeply disconnected from my own body. "I don't think you're in your body," she said. For years, "you didn't really think about what you're putting into it, because you're separate from it." All this stemmed from an underlying error I had fallen into: "You are treating your body as a thing – a thing that's separate from you... Your whole relationship to your body is: 'Get it to work. Get me to do the work I need to do. Serve me, serve me, get me forward.' It's a machine that you're pressing on. It's a machine that you're kind of exploiting, to be honest—as opposed to this precious life container we've been given that you have to really honor and nurture and treat well."

p. 176 Men are allowed a broader range of acceptable body types, from "dad bods" to "bears." When men receive pressure to change their bodies, they usually want to become more muscular – which brings its own challenges and can be taken to extremes, but isn't inherently unhealthy like starving yourself is. Women are given much less permission to find their own place in the world – they have been pressured for thousands of years to make themselves small and to suppress their desires.

p. 192 I first heard it articulated by the author Lindy West. She wrote: "Loving yourself is not antithetical to health, it is intrinsic to health. You can't take good care of a thing you hate."

The Urge by Carl Erik Fisher, r. Oct. 2022

 p. 230 Reading Nyswander today is still inspiring. Her fierce optimism and respect for the dignity of her patients shine off the page – including recognition of the diversity of psychological and social factors that influence drug use. Casting aside psychoanalytic stereotypes that would reduce all addicts to "masochists" or people seeking a "crude substitute for masturbation," she instead speaks evocatively about the depth and variety of her patients' motivation for using drugs, describing how drug use can serve perfectly understandable functions: "a way of keeping alive whatever life and joy they can feel," or even "a way into a mystical experience," "a clarity of felling and oneness of perception."

p. 266 A fundamental shift in our thinking would be the best way to help people like Josie – letting go of the ideal of a "drug-free" world and instead prioritizing policies and treatments that accept the fact that drug use and addiction are facts of life, unlikely to leave us anytime soon.

p. 281 It is not that addiction is or is not a brain disease, or a social malady, or a universal response to suffering – it's all of these things and none of them at the same time, because each level has something to add but cannot possibly tell the whole story.... [Mental] disorders, in other words, are not ground truths about reality, like chemical elements on the periodic table. Jellinek's word was a good one: they are more like "species" with a general family resemblance – biological species in nature have fuzzy boundaries, and the members of those species are not all the same. We must still make psychiatric diagnoses in order to do research, advocate for insurance payments, or otherwise translate our diagnostic thinking into the real world, but these labels should not be confused with an enduring, unitary, and discrete essence.