An animated purple-and-orange lava lamp

All Highlights

I’m beginning to realise that time does not heal wounds. Time just adds more days in which to feel the effect of them.
—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
And we come back like a bunch of eager Christians, jaws slack and tongues raised, ready to receive what someone died to give us. Comfortable with their sacrifice.
—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
And look, I know how this goes. I know that by the time you get married I’ll have healed enough that I can smile for you too. But this foresight barely makes a dent in the agony of imagining it now. Somehow, each fresh loss feels different, like a maze with shifting walls; I know there’s a way out, but I’m fucked if I can find it.
The photos elicit in me a feeling akin to that of Maeve’s paintings, or the eerie videos that preceded my most recent nightmare. In them I see no past. No future. Just infinite present. And the threat of something unseen. What that thing is, I can’t tell, but there’s a lack in each one, a romanticised longing. I feel I could fall into them, that even as I stand here now, I am free-falling.
—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
I have the solipsistic sense that my own inner world, and not Tarkovsky’s, is being projected up there for everyone to see.
—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
I read over and over this brief exchange, wringing it dry for hidden meaning. And for the next few hours I rest easy knowing where you are, who you’re with, and that I’m on your mind.
—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
your fingers lifting my mouth to yours, the way we moved together, the bruises on my belly from our hip bones grinding.
—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
New Year’s Eve finds me staring at an endless loop of liminal spaces: unfinished construction sites, dreamlike swimming pools with no obvious entrance or exit, mono-yellow hallways in some nondescript hotel. I’m reluctant to call it an addiction, but I can no longer go a day without watching these videos, which get me so close to that feeling of falling, and the sense that at any moment the ground will hit and everything will suddenly make sense.
—Hazel Hayes, Better by Far. Highlighted
But quick as memories come, they are rewritten, altered by the knowledge that you knew then how little time we had. And soon this knowing starts to seep through my whole mind, like ink in water, tainting every memory I have of you, darkening the tone of my whole childhood. I thought that I had mourned you fully. That there would be no more mourning left to do. But this is a fresh, graveside grief, raw and untamed, that doesn’t so much slip under the door as burst through it, demanding my attention.
Many huge achievements are just the result of little actions done persistently over time.
—Derek Sivers, How to Live. Highlighted
Goals don’t improve your future. Goals only improve your present actions. A good goal makes you take action immediately. A bad goal doesn’t. A goal shows what’s right and wrong. What moves you towards your goal is right. What doesn’t is wrong.
—Derek Sivers, How to Live. Highlighted
When talking with people, ask deep open-ended questions — like “What’s your biggest regret?” — that will lead to unexpected stories.
—Derek Sivers, How to Live. Highlighted

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