My Kindle Highlights

I bought my Kindle (the basic one, not the paperwhite or oasis or what have you) on 16th July 2019. Today is the one year anniversary of the thing and I truly believe it might be one of the best investments I made.

Prior to that, I believed that I didn't need another device manufactured by a foreign company for “reading books of all things” but when I used one of my friend’s Kindle for a couple of months, I was sold. I then had the brilliant idea of gifting it to myself from the money I earned from my internship and here we are! One year into it and I have replaced watching TV shows with reading as my primary boredom killer. I read 25+ books during this year which is more than 3 times the number of books I read during the last year and it’s all because of the user experience of the Kindle 10th Gen.

So I thought, why not make a collection of the highlights I made while reading all those books? So here it is and it is mostly meant as a self-reference kind of a thing but if it’s at all useful for any other readers, I’ll be elated. (Some of the non-fiction books I read have too many highlights to add here, so I guess I will make another post for each of them? I’m not sure. Let’s see if I can find the time for it!) I apologize in advance for the Hindi books’ quotes. I try to read at least one Hindi (which is my mother tongue) book along with my other books (I read, on average, 6–8 books in parallel.).

The Final Empire

1. “If you let someone get too close, it would just give them better opportunities to betray you.”
2. “What is belief — what is faith — if you don’t continue in it after failure?”

The Well of Ascension

1. “His search for truths could never be completed, but neither could it be ignored.”
2. “A man was defined not by his flaws, but by how he overcame them.”
3. “If you perpetuate the dreams of the past, then you stifle your own dreams of the future.”
4. “At first glance, the key and the lock it fits may seem very different,” Sazed said. “Different in shape, different in function, different in design. The man who looks at them without knowledge of their true nature might think them opposites, for one is meant to open, and the other to keep closed. Yet, upon closer examination, he might see that without one, the other becomes useless. The wise man then sees that both lock and key were created for the same purpose.”
5. “Those who take lightly promises they make to those they love are people who find little lasting satisfaction in life.”

The Hero of Ages

1. “Being in charge isn’t about doing anything — it’s about making certain that other people do what they’re supposed to! Delegation, my friend. Without it, we would have to bake our own bread and dig our own latrines!”

Idea Makers

1. “Feynman loved doing physics. I think what he loved most was the process of it. Of calculating. Of figuring things out. It didn’t seem to matter to him so much if what came out was big and important. Or esoteric and weird. What mattered to him was the process of finding it. And he was often quite competitive about it.”
2. Once he’d gotten the answer, he’d go back and try to figure out why it was obvious.
3. Yet the statement says that it is unprovable. So here, then, is a statement within mathematics that is unprovable by mathematics: an “undecidable statement”. And its existence immediately shows that there is a certain incompleteness to mathematics: there are mathematical statements that mathematical methods cannot reach.
4. One might think of undecidability as a limitation to progress, but in many ways it is instead a sign of richness. For with it comes computational irreducibility, and the possibility for systems to build up behaviour beyond what can be summarized by simple formulas. Indeed, my own work suggests that much of the complexity we see in nature has precisely this origin. And perhaps it is also the essence of how from deterministic underlying laws we can build up apparent free will.

Parallel Worlds

1. “Why is it that you physicists always require so much expensive equipment? Now the Department of Mathematics requires nothing but money for paper, pencils, and waste paper baskets and the Department of Philosophy is better still. It doesn’t even ask for waste paper baskets. ”
2. When Einstein later complained that “God does not play dice with the world,” Bohr reportedly fired back, “Stop telling God what to do.”

Elantris

1. Pain lost its power when other things became more important.
2. “Truth can never be defeated, Sarene. Even if people do forget about it occasionally.”
3. Ashe replied, “but to live is to have worries and uncertainties. Keep them inside, and they will destroy you for certain — leaving behind a person so callused that emotion can find no root in his heart.”

Red Sister

1. “All the world and more has rushed eternity’s length to reach this beat of your heat, screaming down the years. And if you let it, the universe, without drawing breath, will press itself through this fractured second and race to the next, on into a new eternity. Everything that is, the echoes of everything that ever was, the roots of all that will ever be, must pass through this moment that you own. Your only task is to give it pause and to make it notice.”
2. “They fear the possibility of failure — just as the fear of death weighs so many down when they fight. The warrior though hates fear: it’s an attack like any other and must be fought. She throws herself at it, all or nothing, she dares it and disdains it. Death claims us all in the end, but the warrior chooses the ground on which she meets it, and the manner, she makes death run to catch up!”
3. “Those that burn short burn bright. The shortest lives can cast the longest shadows.”
4. “Your death has not been waiting for your arrival at the appointed hour: it has for all the years of your life, been racing towards you with the fierce velocity of time’s arrow. It cannot be evaded, it cannot be bargained with, deflected or placated. All that is given to you is the choice: meet it with open eyes and peace in your heart, go gentle to your reward. Or burn bright, take up arms, and fight the bitch.”
5. “Every star, turning in the black depth of heaven, burns for no better reason than that humanity raised its face to look. Every great deed needs to be witnessed. Go out and do something great.”

Exhalation

1. “Hope that you were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise from a universe’s exhalation. Because even if a universe’s life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not.”
2. “Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.”
3. “My message to you is this: Pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t.”
4. “Writing lets you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having see them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.”

Warbreaker

1. “If you do nothing, then the problems are as much your fault as if you had instigated them.”
2. “You want to be competent? You want to learn to be in control of what goes on around you, rather than just being pushed around? Then you’ll have to learn to deal with failure.”

The Way of Kings

1. “But expectations were like fine pottery. The harder you held them, the more likely they were to crack.”
2. “A blank page was nothing but potential, pointless until it was used.”
3. “The body needs many different foods to remain healthy. And the mind needs many different ideas to remain sharp.”
4. “It was fulfilling to be able to do something where progress was obvious.”
5. “Let your actions defend you, not your words.”
6. “If we do nothing with the knowledge we gain, then we have wasted our study. Books can store information better than we can — what we do that books can’t is interpret. So if one is not going to draw conclusions, then one might as well just leave the information in the texts.”
7. “Keep in mind that channelling your capacities and stifling them are two separate things.”
8. “Life before Death. Strength before Weakness. Journey before Destination.”

The Hobbit (First Re-read after 2015)

1. There is nothing like looking if you want to find something. You certainly usually find something, if you look, but is not always quite the something you were after.

Mahabharata (Currently Reading)

Although I’m a devout atheist, Mahabharata is one of the best ever fantasy series written with a million life lessons. I thought it would be an excellent exercise to go through it at least once in my life so I picked the unabridged Hindi translated version from Gorakhpur press.

1. जो वेदस्वरूप उत्तम ज्ञान के दाता गुरु का आदर नहीं करता, वह कलंकित हो कर नरकगामी होता है।
2. जो मनुष्य अपनी निन्दा सह लेता है, उसने सारे जगत्‌पर विजय प्राप्त कर ली।
3. एक मनुष्य सौ वर्ष तक निरन्तर यज्ञ करे और दूसरा क्रोध न करे तो उससे क्रोध न करने वाला ही श्रेष्ठ है।
4. अब मुझे निश्चय हो गया कि विषयों के भोग की कामना उनके भोग से शान्त नहीं होती। आग में जितना घी डालते जाओ, वह बढ़ती ही जाती है। पृथ्वी में जितना भी अन्न, सोना, पशु और स्त्रियाँ हैं वे एक कामुक की कामना पूर्ण करने में भी असमर्थ हैं। इसलिये सुख उनकी प्राप्ति से नहीं, उनके त्याग से ही होता है। दुर्बुद्धि लोग तृष्णा का त्याग नहीं कर सकते। बूढ़े होने पर भी वह बूढ़ी नहीं होती। वह एक प्राणान्तक रोग है। उसे छोड़ने पर ही सुख मिलता है।
5. दुःख से जले नहीं; सुख से फूले नहीं। दोनों में समान रहे।
6. स्वर्ग के सात द्वार हैं — दान, तप, शम, दम, लज्जा, सरलता और सब पर दया।
7. अभय के चार साधन हैं — अग्निहोत्र, मौन, वेदाध्ययन और यज्ञ। यदि अनुचित रीति से अहंकार के साथ इनका अनुष्ठान होता है तो ये भय के कारण बन जाते हैं।
8. शास्त्र स्पष्ट शब्दों में कहते हैं कि कुल के लिये एक मनुष्य का, ग्राम के लिये एक कुल का, देश के लिये एक ग्राम का और आत्मकल्याण के लिये सारी पृथ्वी का भी परित्याग कर।
9. बड़े-बड़े कुलीन भी अपने अन्तःकरण पर वश न होने के कारण काम के फंदे में फँस जाते हैं और अपने ही हाथों अपनी दुर्गति करते हैं।
10. मनुष्य चार ऋण लेकर जन्म लेता है — पितृ-ऋण, देव-ऋण, ऋषि-ऋण और मनुष्य-ऋण। यज्ञ से देवता, स्वाध्याय और तपस्या से ऋषि, पुत्र तथा श्राद्ध से पितर एवं परोपकार से मनुष्य का ऋण उतरता है।

The Stand (Currently Reading)

1. “Responsibility is a pie. Some of the responsibility goes with all the charity work she does, but you’re only kidding if you think you’re not going to have to cut a big, juicy, bitter piece for yourself. And eat every bite.”

Godan (Currently Reading)

1. काना कहने से काने को जो दुःख होता है, वह क्या दो आँखों वाले आदमी को हो सकता है?

So that’s it for this year. You can find the whole list of books I read and plan to read on my Goodreads here. Feel free to follow me there. Unfortunately, I don’t accept any friend requests on Goodreads because it just fills my activity feed by the activities of my friends which is a pretty bad feature of the website.

Anyway, I hope this list added something to your values. And I really hope all of this will add something to my values when I go through these in the future.