Nella is glad to be out of Assendelft, true – but home is nowhere – it is neither back there in the fields nor here in the canals. Adrift, she feels shipwrecked between the idea of
her marriage and its actual state, and the cabinet, beautiful and useless, is a horrible reminder of it all.

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“Then I remembered that the rebels in ancient China were in the middle of a revolution—making mooncakes probably wasn’t high on their priority list, either. But they still found a way to turn the situation to their advantage. The mooncakes brought allies together and inspired people to rise up and fight for their loved ones. And that’s how a war was won.”

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Valerie goes first. She eloquently explains how her grandma taught her that the five nuts in her baked mooncake—peanuts, walnuts, sesame seeds, melon seeds, and almonds—represent the five virtues of ancient Chinese philosophy—benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and fidelity.

-Sher Lee

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The greatest temptation journalists face is to regard the stories they write as their own. They are not: they are the stories of those who are involved in the events reported. It's not the journalist who is the hero, it's those who suffer the famines or floods, those who fight cruelty or oppression, those who govern and those who oppose them.
-Mark Tully

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Rajni realized that this was the motto of her entire life as the eldest sister.

She was in charge. Nobody else had that responsibility, and—at least according to Mum—nobody else had managed to screw it up as much as she had. Jezmeen and Shirina had no idea what Rajni had sacrificed.— % &

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One solution is to avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are.

In the words of investor Paul Graham, “keep your identity small.”

The more you let a single belief define you, the less capable you are of adapting when life challenges you.— % &

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You have the power to change your beliefs about yourself. Your identity is not set in stone. You have a choice in every moment. You can choose the identity you want to reinforce today with the habits you choose today.— % &

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Changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years.

- James Clear

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When your restless mind and body is put to sleep.

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Its been a while I read a book.
Infact these days, I can hardly
Read a page or two.
Either I swing between feeling too much
Or feeling calm
However staying in the middle is hard to get by.
With the pandemic and the lockdown
I fear it situations will repeat itself twice.

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