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Quote by Hanya Yanagihara

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A Little Life

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Hanya Yanagihara

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“I don't even notice the mob until it's rushing toward me. They snort and pant, ash-colored jackets swirling as their arms and legs pull at the air. A few hundred of them stampede in my direction, and there’s no way to escape. I’m convinced that I’m about to be swept away. I’ll kick, I’ll struggle, but their momentum will be too much for me. They’ll carry me to justice. No escape this time. But the mob reaches me and keeps moving. They’re heading somewhere, and I just got in their way. I stop fighting, and move in the same direction as everyone else, and soon the crowd shelters me, buries me inside its raucousness.”

ProtestModern SocietySelf Absorption
Book:The City in the Middle of the Night
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“American citizens are self-absorbed, and the U.S. government devotes its immense resources to achieving the capitalistic demands of its citizenry. Thoughts do not saturate American politics. Corporations employ lobbyist and they fund political action committees that exert inordinate influence in shaping the outcome of this nation’s political agendas. Lobbyist devote their paid for services to sway government officials including legislators and members of regulatory agencies to carry out the programs of powerful corporations and wealthy individuals, granting unprecedented socioeconomic power in the hallowed chambers of the American government to wealthy segments of society. American corporations and affluent people exploit American culture, morals, and religion to push their private interests including inexplicable economic and military incursions into foreign counties. I feel increasingly disenfranchised and unrepresented in America’s supposedly participatory democratic government given the entrenchment of power in a select few. American democracy grants material benefits to the wealthy, vulgarizes the middle class, and ignores the disenfranchised poor. Many Americans applaud prosperous groups exploiting the lower classes, presumably because everyone aspires to become rich. A person and a society that employs vanities and greediness to measure their worthiness is hopelessly doomed. Future historians will venerate an empire that pursued achievement of great deeds based upon virtuous principles. Conversely, the historians of tomorrow will skewer contemporary Americans for their compulsive need to consume the ecosystem and trounce upon the rights of other nations to live peacefully. American vanities and unchecked desire to enjoy an easy life could destroy the world, as we know it.”

AmericaConsumersConsumerismEgotismSelf AbsorbedSelf AbsorptionEcosystemCitizens Of The WorldEnvironmentalism PeacefulVanity Egotists
Book:Dead Toad Scrolls
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“Although we all begin our transformative practice, if we begin at all, focused entirely on all the good it will do for us as individuals, the long-term effect of these practices is to loosen that inevitable self-absorption and help us to see that liberation is not so much for the self as it is from the self.”

PracticeSelf Absorption
Book:Living Skillfully: Buddhist Philosophy of Life from the Vimalakirti Sutra
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