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“A book is a garden, an orchard, a storehouse, a party, a company by the way, a counselor, a multitude of counselors.”
– Charles Baudelaire
The beginning of the new year is for many a time for reflection and review, as well as an opportunity to look ahead.
For me, together with my yearly goal setting, revisiting the books I read in the previous year and the notes I have taken while reading them has become an integral part of my own reflection and planning routine.
For the past five years now I have picked and shared a quote from each book. Below are the 31 books I read (or re-read) this past year, 2022, along with one quote that, for one reason or another, resonated with me.
Non-Fiction
Amplified: Unleash Your Potential Through the Power of Music (Frank Fitzpatrick)
“Your ears don’t close; they stay open to protect you. They are the primary self-preservation warning system for your reptilian brain.”
The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives (Leonard Mlodinow)
“We judge people and initiatives by their results, and we expect events to happen for good, understandable reason. But our clear visions of inevitability are often only illusions.”
The Body Keeps the Score: Mind, Brain and Body in the Transformation of Trauma (Bessel van der Kolk)
“After trauma the world is experienced with a different nervous system. The survivor’s energy now becomes focused on suppressing inner chaos, at the expense of spontaneous involvement in their lives.”
Babel: Around the World in 20 Languages (Gaston Dorren)
“To quote an erudite British author of my acquaintance: ‘In English one can embark on a sentence with no very clear idea of the destination, but with German we find we can’t really improvise in that way. We have to have a clear notion of what we’re going to say before we try to say it, and we have to get the clauses in the right order.’”
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses (Eric Ries)
“I believe ‘entrepreneur’ should be a job title in all modern companies that depend on innovation for their future growth.”
The Anthropocene Reviewed (John Green)
“We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.”
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Robert M. Sapolsky)
“Your heart does roughly the same thing whether you are in a murderous rage or having an orgasm. […] The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”
Foundations of Flavor: The Noma Guide to Fermentation (René Redzepi, David Zilber)
“There’s a thin line between rot and fermentation, and that line might best be understood as an actual line, like the kind you’d find outside a nightclub. Rot is a club where everyone gets in: bacteria and fungi, safe or unsafe, flavor enhancing or destructive. When you ferment something, you’re taking on the role of a bouncer, keeping out unwanted microbes and letting in the ones that are going to make the party pop.”
Work Better Together: How to Cultivate Strong Relationships to Maximize Well-Being and Boost Bottom Lines (Jen Fisher, Anh Nguyen Phillips)
“Employees only know a vision is truly important when leaders pursue it with intentionality.”
80/20 Running: Run Stronger and Race Faster by Training Slower (Matt Fitzgerald)
“Becoming a more skillful and efficient runner is more like growing a beard than it is like chopping wood.”
Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days (Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky, Brad Kowitz)
“Customer reactions are solid gold, but their feedback is worth pennies on the dollar.”
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (Nir Eyal)
“If it can’t be used for evil, it’s not a superpower.”
Cracking the PM Career: The Skills, Frameworks, and Practices to Become a Great Product Manager (Jackie Bavaro, Gayle Laakmann McDowell)
“Credibility is the currency of a PM.”
Matter and Memory (Henri Bergson)
“The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.”
The Courage to Be Disliked: How to Free Yourself, Change your Life and Achieve Real Happiness (Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga)
“If I change, the world will change. No one else will change the world for me.”
Fiction
The Well of Ascension (Brandon Sanderson)
“There are two ways to stay safe, Reen’s voice whispered to her. Either be so quiet and harmless that people ignore you, or be so dangerous that they’re terrified of you.”
Montecrypto (Tom Hillenbrand)
“Schelling sagt, dass es Punkte gibt, die von Menschen instinktiv angesteuert oder ausgewählt werden, wenn sie zu wenig Informationen haben und nicht kommunizieren können.”
The Hero of Ages (Brandon Sanderson)
“Somehow, we’ll find it. The balance between whom we wish to be and whom we need to be. But for now, we simply have to be satisfied with who we are.”
The Three-Body Problem (Liu Cixin)
“Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”
Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
“There are times when the world is rearranging itself, and at times like that, the right words can change the world.”
The Dark Forest (Liu Cixin)
“No, no. Don’t say where we are! Once we know where we are, then the world becomes as narrow as a map. When we don’t know, the world feels unlimited.”
Death’s End (Liu Cixin)
“The child that was human civilization had opened the door to her home and glanced outside. The endless night terrified her so much that she shuddered against the expansive and profound darkness, and shut the door firmly.”
Ready Player One (Ernest Cline)
“The Facts were right there waiting for me, hidden in old books written by people who weren’t afraid to be honest.”
Project Hail Mary (Project Hail Mary)
“We’re as smart as evolution made us. So we’re the minimum intelligence needed to ensure we can dominate our planets.”
Ready Player Two (Ernest Cline)
“Maybe every time an intelligent species grew advanced enough to invent a global computer network, they would then develop some form of social media, which would immediately fill these beings with such an intense hatred for one another that they ended up wiping themselves out within four or five decades.”
Exhalation (Ted Chiang)
“Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so. I feel I have the right to tell you this because, as I am inscribing these words, I am doing the same.”
The Midnight Library (Matt Haig)
“Sometimes just to say your own truth out loud is enough to find others like you.”
A Wizard of Earthsea (Ursula K. Le Guin)
“To light a candle is to cast a shadow.”
The Tombs of Atuan (Ursula K. Le Guin)
“I was dying of thirst when you gave me water, yet it was not the water alone that saved me. It was the strength of the hands that gave it.”
The Farthest Shore (Ursula K. Le Guin)
“Do nothing because it is righteous or praiseworthy or noble to do so; do nothing because it seems good to do so; do only that which you must do and which you cannot do in any other way.”
Tehanu (Ursula K. Le Guin)
“If your strength is only the other’s weakness, you live in fear.”
I hope you found as much inspiration in these ideas as I have, or got curious to pick up some of these books yourself.
If you still haven’t had enough quotes, here are my lists from 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021.
And with that, I wish you an amazing 2023, full of great books, big ideas, and impactful actions.