Reading

Reading represents a curated collection of insights, quotes, and references drawn from extensive personal reading across technology, philosophy, creativity, and culture. This collection is assembled with the joy of a librarian who has spent years wandering through ideas, hoping that some spark of wisdom might ignite in every passerby.

On Learning and Beginner's Mind

The most profound insights often come from maintaining curiosity and openness to possibility:

> In the beginner mind there are many possibilities; in the expert mind there are few.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind**

> After you have practiced for a while, you will realize that it is not possible to make rapid, extraordinary progress. Even though you try very hard, the progress you make is always little by little. It is not like going out in a shower in which you know when you get wet.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> Even in wrong practice, when you realize it and continue, there is right practice. Our practice cannot be perfect, but without being discouraged by this, we should continue it. This is the secret of practice.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> The purpose of studying Buddhism is not to study Buddhism, but to study ourselves. It is impossible to study ourselves without some teaching.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> When you want to hurry something, that means you no longer care about it and want to get on to other things.

• • — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance**

On Truth, Reality, and Storytelling

The relationship between truth and narrative is more complex than we often acknowledge:

> Truth, uncompromisingly told, will always have its ragged edges.

• • — David Shields, Reality Hunger**

> All the best stories are true.

• • — David Shields**

> Human memory, driven by emotional self-interest, goes to extraordinary lengths to provide evidence to back up whatever understanding of the world we have our hearts set on—however removed that may be from reality.

• • — David Shields**

> Fiction doesnt require its readers to believe; in fact, it offers its readers the great freedom of experience without belief—something real life cant do. Fiction gives us a rhetorical question: What if this happened? (The best) nonfiction gives us a statement, something more complex: This may have happened.

• • — David Shields**

> The moment you put pen to paper and begin to shape a story, the essential nature of life—that one damn thing after another—is lost.

• • — David Shields**

> Biography and autobiography are the lifeblood of art right now. We have claimed them the way earlier generations claimed the novel, the well-made play, the language of abstraction.

• • — David Shields**

> Suddenly everyone tale is tellable, which seems to me a good thing, even if not everyone story turns out to be fascinating or well told.

• • — David Shields**

> The stories you tell come true. If you believe everyone is untrustworthy, youll build that into your systems so that even the best people have to act like the worst people to get anything done. If you assume people are okay, you live a much happier life.

• • — Cory Doctorow, Walkaway**

On Technology, Power, and Social Systems

Technology is never neutral—it reflects and shapes the values of those who create and deploy it:

> Security is about how you configure power, who has access to what. That is political.

• • — Joseph Menn, Cult of the Dead Cow**

> Small groups with shared values can do even more, especially when they are otherwise diverse in their occupations, backgrounds, and perspectives. In the early days of a major change, cross sections of pioneers can have an outsize impact on its trajectory.

• • — Joseph Menn**

> One lesson from the Cult of the Dead Cow remarkable story is that those who develop a personal ethical code and stick to it in unfamiliar places can accomplish amazing things.

• • — Joseph Menn**

> We were pirates, not mercenaries. Pirates have a code.

• • — Joseph Menn**

> It was a time of moral reckoning. People realized the power that they had. Hundreds of focused tech experts with little socialization, let alone formal ethics training, were suddenly unleashed.

• • — Joseph Menn**

> If your security is not strong enough to stop script kiddies with publicly available tools, then you have no hope of securing your network from professionals waging war.

• • — Joseph Menn**

> The cDc people were, at least for the most part, up until the later 1990s, more interested in writing, music, art, and that sort of thing. The technical issues were subsidiary to that.

• • — Joseph Menn**

> If you need to pay me to do math, thats because a) youve figured out how to starve me unless I do a job, and b) you want me to do boring, stupid math with no intrinsic interest. A job creator is someone who figures out how to threaten you with starvation unless you do something you dont want to do.

• • — Cory Doctorow, Walkaway**

> We have cultural as well as genetic traits. We pass them on. When we come up with a society like default, it selects for people who are wasteful jerks that succeed by stabbing their neighbors in the back.

• • — Cory Doctorow**

On Information, Connection, and Value

The nature of information and value has fundamentally shifted in the networked age:

> Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection, and sharing are.

• • — David Shields, Reality Hunger**

> Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work.

• • — David Shields**

> What counts are the ways in which these common copies of a creative work can be linked, manipulated, tagged, highlighted, bookmarked, translated, enlivened by other media, and sewn together in the universal library.

• • — David Shields**

> Meaning, ultimately, is a matter of adjacent data.

• • — David Shields**

> As recently as the late eighteenth century, landscape paintings were commonly thought of as a species of journalism. Real art meant pictures of allegorical or biblical subjects. A landscape was a mere record or report.

• • — David Shields**

On Systems Thinking and Complexity

Understanding how complex systems work is essential for navigating our interconnected world:

> Some interconnections in systems are actual physical flows, such as the water in the trees trunk or the students progressing through a university. Many interconnections are flows of information—signals that go to decision points or action points within a system. These kinds of interconnections are often harder to see, but the system reveals them to those who look.

• • — Donella Meadows, Thinking in Systems**

> Systems can be nested within systems. Therefore, there can be purposes within purposes.

• • — Donella Meadows**

> Stocks change over time through the actions of a flow. Flows are filling and draining, births and deaths, purchases and sales, growth and decay, deposits and withdrawals, successes and failures. A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within the system.

• • — Donella Meadows**

> Youll be thinking not in terms of a static world, but a dynamic one. Youll stop looking for whos to blame; instead youll start asking, Whats the system? The concept of feedback opens up the idea that a system can cause its own behavior.

• • — Donella Meadows**

> The information delivered by a feedback loop can only affect future behavior; it cant deliver the information, and so cant have an impact fast enough to correct behavior that drove the current feedback.

• • — Donella Meadows**

On Creative Process and Work

The practice of creative work requires discipline, ritual, and acceptance of imperfection:

> For the morning writing, her ritual is to rise around 5:00, make coffee, and watch the light come. This last part is crucial. Writers all devise ways to approach that place where they expect to make the contact, where they become the conduit. For me, light is the signal in the transaction. Its not being in the light, its being there before it arrives.

• • — Toni Morrison, quoted in Daily Rituals**

> For each insight he wished to remember, he would pin a small piece of paper on a particular part of his clothes, which he would associate with the thought. When he returned home he would unpin these and write down each idea.

• • — Mason Currey, Daily Rituals**

> You should burn yourself completely. If you do not burn yourself completely, a trace of yourself will be left in what you do.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> When you bow, you should just bow; when you sit, you should just sit; when you eat, you should just eat. If you do this, the universal nature is there.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> We ourselves cannot put any magic spells on this world. The world is its own magic.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> There is a saying, To catch two birds with one stone. That is what people usually try to do. Because they want to catch too many birds they find it difficult to be concentrated on one activity, and they may end up not catching any birds at all!

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

On Travel and Direct Experience

There is no substitute for direct, unfiltered experience of the world:

> You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other. In a car youre always in a compartment, and because youre used to it you dont realize that through that car window everything you see is just more TV. Youre a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone.

• • — Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance**

> On a cycle youre in the scene, not just watching it, and storms are definitely part of it.

• • — Robert Pirsig**

> Life doesnt happen along interstates. Its against the law.

• • — William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways**

> As soon as my worries became only the old immediate worries of the road—Whens the rain going to stop? Who can you trust to fix a waterpump around here? Wheres the best pie in town?—then I would slow down.

• • — William Least Heat-Moon**

> I had nothing to lose but the chains, and I hoped to find down the county roads Ma in her beanery and Pap over his barbecue pit, both still serving slow food from the same place they did thirty years ago. Where-you-from-buddy restaurants.

• • — William Least Heat-Moon**

On Community and Mutual Aid

How we organize ourselves and treat each other defines the quality of our lives:

> Thats the walkaway dilemma. If you take without giving, youre a mooch. If you keep track of everyone elses taking and giving, youre a creep scorekeeper. Its our version of Christian guilt—its impious to feel good about your piety.

• • — Cory Doctorow, Walkaway**

> What bothers me about the whole concept of pacifism, is that its fundamentally elitist. Poor people—people who have to live every day with violence by police, who are used to it, who expect it… theyre not going to see anything admirable, let alone heroic, in inviting police violence, and then facing it passively.

• • — David Graeber, Direct Action**

> Humor is one of the great binding things in the world, and something that cDc shared with the Pranksters was using humor to question the legitimacy of power. The thing about acidheads is, they think authority is funny.

• • — Joseph Menn, quoting John Perry Barlow**

> Anybody who wants to inhibit that theft with electronic mischief has my complete support.

• • — John Perry Barlow, on corporate data collection**

On Personal Growth and Self-Understanding

The journey inward requires as much courage as any external adventure:

> Bit by bit, she learned to surf the moods. She recognized the furies as phenomena separate from objective reality. They were real. She really felt them. They werent triggered by any real thing in the world where everyone else lived. They were private weather, hers to experience alone or share with others as she chose.

• • — Cory Doctorow, Walkaway**

> His beliefs dont start with the idea that its okay to kid yourself youre a special snowflake who deserves more cookies than all the other kids. It starts with the idea that its human nature to kid yourself and take the last cookie.

• • — Cory Doctorow**

> I told myself I was making the world better. I thought there were useful and useless people and if you didnt keep the useful people happy, the useless ones would starve. Of course I put myself in the useful group. It was fucked up. I fucked up. Thats what Im trying to say sorry for.

• • — Cory Doctorow**

> We both know plenty of read-only people who always say the same thing no matter what we say.

• • — Cory Doctorow**

> When your mind becomes demanding, when you long for something, you will end up violating your own precepts. If you keep your original mind, the precepts will keep themselves.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> We say, A good father is not a good father. Do you understand? One who thinks he is a good father is not a good father; one who thinks he is a good husband is not a good husband.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

On Photography and Seeing

The act of framing reality through a lens reveals as much as it conceals:

> This is the hardest stuff in the world to photograph. You need a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree lens, or something. You see it, and then you look down in the ground glass and its just nothing. As soon as you put a border on it, its gone.

• • — Robert Pirsig, on photographing landscapes**

> As recently as the late eighteenth century, landscape paintings were commonly thought of as a species of journalism. Real art meant pictures of allegorical or biblical subjects. A landscape was a mere record or report. As such, it couldnt be judged for its imaginative vision, its capacity to create and embody a world of complex meanings; instead, it was measured on the rack of its accuracy.

• • — David Shields**

On Memory and Time

How we remember shapes who we become:

> Of course, to live is to create problems. If we did not appear in this world, our parents would have no difficulty with us! Just by appearing we create problems for them. This is all right. Everything creates some problems.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> And we should do something new. To do something new, of course we must know our past, and this is all right. But we should not keep holding on to anything we have done; we should only reflect on it.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> It is necessary to remember what we have done, but we should not become attached to what we have done in some special sense.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> Repeating his recollections in this way, his personality will be twisted more and more, until he becomes quite a disagreeable, stubborn fellow. This is an example of leaving a trace of ones thinking.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> EVERY CHAUTAUQUA SHOULD HAVE A LIST SOMEWHERE OF valuable things to remember that can be kept in some safe place for times of future need and inspiration.

• • — Robert Pirsig**

On Practice and Discipline

Consistent practice transforms both practitioner and practice:

> At first you will have various problems, and it is necessary for you to make some effort to continue our practice. For the beginner, practice without effort is not true practice. For the beginner, the practice needs great effort.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> The way to practice without having any goal is to limit your activity, or to be concentrated on what you are doing in this moment. Instead of having some particular object in mind, you should limit your activity.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> If you practice zazen with your whole body and mind, even for a moment, that is zazen. So moment after moment you should devote yourself to your practice.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> The teaching which is written on paper is not the true teaching. Written teaching is a kind of food for your brain. Of course it is necessary to take some food for your brain, but it is more important to be yourself by practicing the right way of life.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

On Consciousness and Awareness

The nature of awareness itself remains mysterious and worth investigating:

> You should not be absent-minded. But to be aware of the movement does not mean to be aware of your small self, but rather of your universal nature, or Buddha nature. This kind of awareness is very important.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> Usually everyone forgets about zazen. Everyone forgets about God. They work very hard at the second and third kinds of creation, but God does not help the activity. How is it possible for Him to help when He does not realize who He is?

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> So to find the meaning of your life in the zendo is to find the meaning of your everyday activity. To be aware of the meaning of your life, you practice zazen.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

> I think some of you who practice zazen here may believe in some other religion, but I do not mind.

• • — Shunryu Suzuki**

Books That Shaped Understanding

These volumes represent waypoints in an ongoing journey of intellectual exploration:

• • Technology and Hacker Culture**

- Cult of the Dead Cow - Joseph Menn: The definitive history of hacktivism and ethical hacking - What the Dormouse Said - John Markoff: How the counterculture created the personal computer - The Idea Factory - Jon Gertner: Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation - In the Plex - Steven Levy: Inside Google and the digital revolution - Silicon Values - Jillian York: How tech platforms shape global discourse - Abolish Silicon Valley - Wendy Liu: A critique of tech industry culture and alternatives

• • Philosophy and Wisdom Traditions**

- Zen Mind, Beginners Mind - Shunryu Suzuki: Foundational text on Zen practice and beginner mind - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig: Philosophy of quality and rational thought - The I Ching or Book of Changes - Ancient Chinese divination and philosophy text - Tao Te Ching - Lao Tzu: Classical Taoist philosophy on harmony and action - Be Here Now - Ram Dass: Consciousness, spirituality, and present moment awareness

• • Systems and Complexity**

- Thinking in Systems - Donella Meadows: How to understand complex systems and leverage points - Company of One - Paul Jarvis: Sustainable business philosophy focused on optimization over growth - The Utopia of Rules - David Graeber: Bureaucracy, technology, and the secret joys of administration

• • Creative Process and Storytelling**

- Reality Hunger - David Shields: Art, truth, and the relationship between fiction and nonfiction - The War of Art - Steven Pressfield: Overcoming creative resistance and professional discipline - Daily Rituals - Mason Currey: How artists, writers, and creators structure their work - Tools of Titans - Tim Ferriss: Tactics and routines from high performers across fields

• • Culture and Social Analysis**

- Direct Action - David Graeber: Ethnography of protest movements and consensus decision-making - Notes of a Native Son - James Baldwin: Essays on race, identity, and American society - America on Fire - Elizabeth Hinton: Understanding urban uprisings and systemic inequality

• • Travel and Place**

- Blue Highways - William Least Heat-Moon: Journey through small-town America on back roads - The Fundamentals of Motorcycle Camping - Bob Woofter: Practical guide to adventure travel

• • Science Fiction as Social Commentary**

- Walkaway - Cory Doctorow: Post-scarcity society and alternatives to capitalism - The Dispossessed - Ursula K. Le Guin: Anarchism, physics, and utopian possibilities - Exhalation - Ted Chiang: Stories exploring consciousness, time, and meaning

A Librarians Note

These quotes and references represent years of reading across diverse domains, united by curiosity about how humans create meaning, organize societies, and navigate complexity. Each quote was chosen not for its definitive truth, but for its capacity to spark further thinking.

The goal is not to provide answers, but to offer questions worth wrestling with, perspectives worth considering, and voices worth hearing. In an age of information abundance, curation becomes an act of love—highlighting the signal within the noise.

Read widely. Question everything. Find the connections between seemingly disparate ideas. The most interesting insights often emerge at the intersections between disciplines, cultures, and ways of thinking.

Most importantly: these are starting points, not destinations. Every quote here should send you toward the original source, and from there toward new questions and new explorations.

The library is infinite. The journey never ends. And that, perhaps, is the point.

Related Resources

• Ancient Wisdom Systems - Classical philosophy integration with modern thinking
• Information Architecture for Humans - Knowledge organization principles
• Documentation Discipline - Systematic approach to capturing and connecting insights
• Context Alchemy Primitives - Seven fundamental operations for knowledge work