Author's Note

I've spent most of my life chasing meaning — in books, in conversations, in those late-night insomniac thoughts that refused to shut up. And every now and then, a sentence didn't just reach me — it grabbed me by the collar, stared me dead in the eyes, and whispered: "Are you finally ready to grow?"

Osho once asked me such a question, and I remember his words about enlightenment — how the Indians say "No, no, no" when they attain it, when they no longer wish to be born again. I thought, "yeah, it's a good way to think too, but I want to keep counting unless I get really tired of it." And guess what? I have always let the sentences haunt me, scare me. Even at my highest moments, sentences always push me into further awakening. I never stop building my trove of 30 sentences.

Some lines healed me. Some sank me into vast, wordless sadness. Some humbled me. A few slapped me so hard my identity staggered — like Sartre's Being and Nothingness, which hit me right in the face and made my living foundation falter. I was 21 then, still shaking from its aftermath.

Between 19 and 21, I read one book in six months: Zarathustra. I encountered Nietzsche for the first time, and his prose captured me — he never left me after. Many of his passages screamed like they were ripping themselves out of the page, determined to haunt me. I regard Nietzsche as a poet more than a philosopher. For me, he isn't a philosopher at all. He is a man of prose incarnated as Zarathustra.

After that, my horizon widened. I moved beyond Osho, Krishnamurti, and Nietzsche, and discovered Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and many other profound thinkers in philosophical history. Each one of them shifted something in me — quietly, permanently.

These aren't quotes I collected for inspiration. They are the sharpened shards I've lifted again and again to threaten my own identity, to carve away illusions I didn't know I was living inside. I rarely pick new books to read. I go back to them again and again like a lover returns to familiar arms for solace.

I remember reading the Gita in silence, sitting in a quiet room — watching the collapsing architecture of my own perspective. One verse struck me — the one on karma, on action without the hunger for reward. It woke me in the middle of the night.