Welcome to my personal quote journal, an archive of words that amused, inspired, enlightened, or in another way resonated with me over the years. Curating this is my own way of journaling to understand my thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Plus, their near-eidetic recitation passes as a party trick in the right setting.

I keep adding finds to my collection and share selections here periodically. Enjoy browsing. Filter by category or be delighted by the randomness of it all.

Claude Debussy

“Music is the space between the notes.”

Atul Gawande

“We’ve been wrong about what our job is in medicine. We think our job is to ensure health and survival. But really it is larger than that. It is to enable well-being.”

Philip Roth

“You cannot observe people through an ideology. Your ideology observes for you.”

Kim Malone Scott

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”

Georgia O'Keeffe

“Nothing is less real than realism. Details are confusing. It is only by selection, by elimination, by emphasis, that we get at the real meaning of things.”

Suleika Jaouad

“To learn to swim in the ocean of not-knowing — this is my constant work.”

Jenny Odell

“It is with acts of attention that we decide who to hear, who to see, and who in our world has agency. In this way, attention forms the ground not just for love, but for ethics.”

Bessel A. van der Kolk

“One day he told me that he’d spent his adulthood trying to let go of his past, and he remarked how ironic it was that he had to get closer to it in order to let it go.”

Jia Tolentino

“I’ve been thinking about five intersecting problems. First, how the internet is built to distend our sense of identity; second, how it encourages us to overvalue our opinions; third, how it maximizes our sense of opposition; fourth, how it cheapens our understanding of solidarity; and, finally, how it destroys our sense of scale.”

Michelle Zauner

“Love was an action, an instinct, a response roused by unplanned moments and small gestures, an inconvenience in someone else’s favor.”