2019: Most Impactful Books
Here is a list of the most impactful books I read in 2019:
Emergent Strategy — adrienne maree brown
“It is hard work to believe in the apparently impossible enough to move towards it.”
“We are in an imagination battle…Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone’ else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.”
“Science fiction is simply a way to practice the future together. i suspect that is what many of you are up to, practicing futures together, practicing justice together, living into new stories. It is our right and responsibility to create a new world.”
“What is easy is sustainable. Birds coast when they can.”
The Dispossessed — Ursula Le Guin
“Human solidarity is our only resource.”
“You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.”
“And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern. You need distance, interval. The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon. The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.”
“The thing about working with time, instead of against it, he thought, is that it is not wasted. Even pain counts.”
“You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.”
Calm — The School of Life
“Love is a skill to be learnt, rather than just an emotion to be felt.”
“Two people should see a relationship as a constant opportunity to improve and be improved. When lovers teach each other uncomfortable truths, they are not giving up on love. They are trying to do something very true to love: which is to make their partners more loveable.”
“If we cannot always be entirely sane in our relationships, the kindest thing we can do for those who care about us is to hand over some maps that try to chart and guide others through the more disturbed regions of our internal world.”
“A major portion of being upset is being premature.”
“We don’t shout when things go wrong, only when they go wrong and we hadn’t expected them — Except challenge, difference, feeling misunderstood, learning.”
“Being calm is about leaning towards unintentional hurt.”
“No need to be anxious that we are anxious. Not a sign things have gone wrong; it’s a sign we are alive.”
So You Want to Talk About Race — Ijeoma Oluo
“This promise — that you will get more because they exist to get less — is woven throughout our entire society. Our politics, our education system, our infrastructure — anywhere there is a finite amount of power, influence, visibility, wealth, or opportunity. Anywhere in which someone might miss out. There the lure of that promise sustains racism.”
“If you live in this system of white supremacy, you are either fighting the system of you are complicit. There is no neutrality to be had towards systems of injustice, it is not something you can just opt out of.”
“You have to get over the fear of facing the worst in yourself. You should instead fear unexamined racism. Fear the thought that right now, you could be contributing to the oppression of others and you don’t know it. But do not fear those who bring that oppression to light. Do not fear the opportunity to do better.”
Autobiography of Red
“Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.”
