yamilemb's reviews
65 reviews

On some level, my life has been wasted on me. After all, if I can’t remember it, who can?

The New Yorker arrived by mail every week. Along with the Sunday New York Times and The Saturday Review of Literature, it was required reading for the diaspora of smart people living in Hollywood; reading it made them feel they hadn’t lost a step, that they could move back east at a moment’s notice.

the informational cascade, which turns out to be something that’s repeated so many times that it becomes true even though it isn’t.

“Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they’re talking about.”

“Violence is one way to silence people, to deny their voice and their credibility, to assert your right to control over their right to exist”

“billions of women must be out there on this seven-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever.”

“Most women fight wars on two fronts, one for whatever the putative topic is and one simply for the right to speak, to have ideas, to be acknowledged to be in possession of facts and truths, to have value, to be a human being.”

“We have an abundance of rape and violence against women in this country and on this Earth, though it’s almost never treated as a civil rights or human rights issue, or a crisis, or even a pattern. Violence doesn’t have a race, a class, a religion, or a nationality, but it does have a gender.”

“But that a man who controls some part of the fate of the world apparently devoted his energies to generating fear, misery, and injustice around him says something about the shape of our world and the values of the nations and institutions that tolerated his behavior and that of men like him.”

We know less when we erroneously think we know than when we recognize that we don’t. 

Every step brings us home to the present moment, the only place where life is possible. 

Life is available to us only in the present moment, and if we are not present, we miss out on life

Our idea of happiness may itself be the obstacle, keeping us from true happiness.

We may like to tell our loved one that whatever they may not have finished or healed. In their lifetime, we are doing our best to accomplish for them.

We need to understand the goodness of suffering. It is the compost that helps the roses to grow. It is the mud from which magnificent lotuses emerge.

Miles de mexicanos veían a López Obrador como víctima del gobierno panista y lo abrazaron en su lucha política sin imaginarse el monstruo destructor que estaban creando. 

A lo largo de los seis años de la segunda campaña presidencial, López Obrador acumuló en su oficina una cantidad impresionante de regalos que le daban en las giras. Alejandro Esquer ordenaba que los de gran valor economico se enviaran al domicilio del tabasqueño, y los más corrientitos, esos del pueblo bueno, los ponía a la venta en el garaje. 

Conmigo vivía el amor de mi vida, no César, sino un perro que había rescatado del bazar de Periocapa. 

Durante años había dejado todo por él [César], pero prohibirme trabajar con quien yo quidiera por su ideología absurda me hizo rebelarme. 

Como la ley, la transparencia siempre ha sido un estorbo para López Obrador. 

Es un político muy astuto, tiene un gran olfato político, pero no es inteligente y mucho menos culto. 

Why are you rushing for answers? You should arrive at answers on your own, not rely upon what you get from someone else. 

It is only in social contexts that a person becomes an individual. 

Even if you’re not a loser, even if you’re someone who keeps on winning, if you are someone who has placed himself in competition, you will never have a moment’s peace. 

Intervening in other people’s tasks and taking other people’s tasks turns one’s life into something heavy and full of hardship. “From here on, that is not my task” 

What should one do to not be disliked by anyone? There is only one answer: It is to constantly gauge other people’s feelings while swearing loyalty to all of them. — unfree way to live 

If receiving praise is what one is after, one will have no choice but to adapt to that person’s yardstick and put the breaks on one’s own freedom. 

If one’s means for gaining a feeling of contribution turns out to be “being recognized by others” in the long run, one will have no choice but to walk through life in accordance with other people’s wishes. 

You are possibly rejecting normality because you equate being normal with being incapable. Being normal is not being incapable. One does not need to flaunt one’s superiority. 

But if life were climbing a mountain in order to reach the top, then the greater part of life would end up being “en route”. That is to say, “one’s real life” would begin with one’s trek on the mountainside and the distance one has traveled up until that point would be a “tentative life” led by a “tentative me”.