I'm digging through my current read-for-fun for a good quote, it's titled The Serpent and the Rainbow by Wade Davis.
Shout out time! Shoutouts are sourced from previous posts. Tell me if you want to be added/removed.
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Might have posted this before, but: “...we, and I mean humans, are meaning makers. We do not discover the meanings of mysterious things, we invent them. We make meanings because meaninglessness terrifies us above all things. More than snakes, even. More than falling, or the dark. We trick ourselves into seeing meanings in things, when in fact all we are doing is grafting our meanings onto the universe to comfort ourselves. We gild the chaos of the universe with our symbols. To admit that something is meaningless is just like falling backward into darkness." Two more: “What would it be like to grow up in the world of of prime-time sitcoms? To come of age under the watchful eyes of these audible but invisible gods that live in the fabric of the air, a chorus of judging voices sadistically laughing at you from infancy, at your every mistake, your every misfortune, your every shameful secret, your every foible and error of judgment?” “I own that it sounds kitschy, Gwen; it sounds like sugary romanticism to say the eyes are the windows to the soul, but I wish that poeticism weren’t so shopworn, because I think that it is true. Look into the eyes of another being - the eyes! - these two glistening globs of light perceiving jelly in our skulls are the only external organs that shoot directly back into our brains. When you look, and look directly and look deeply, into the center of another creature’s eyes - into the eyes of another being that has consciousness, emotions, a mind - then you have a profound crisis of experience (or you should, if you’re doing it right): you realize that this other being that is outside of your body lives in a world that is entirely other to your own, and that it may know things that you may not, and that you may know things that it may not, and that it may be possible to exchange information - and then you will want to talk.”
Excerpt from John Donne's Meditation 17 No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were; any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. Paragraph 3 of a four-paragraph meditation. As I was reading CashewGuy's meditation on suicide and the impact suicide might have on other people, I found myself thinking of these lines from John Donne.
// Kent Beck - Approaching a Minimum Viable Product // Paul Graham - Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas I found these cleaning up my Evernote one night when I was exhausted but OCD and anxious and had already completely cleaned the apartment. No idea why these are so similar or why they struck me like they were brand new right now.By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback.
I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, like the popular image of a visionary. You'll be better off if you operate like Columbus and just head in a general westerly direction. Don't try to construct the future like a building, because your current blueprint is almost certainly mistaken. Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward.
Buckets are for water, not for people
//date a ux designer
"I had a chance once to go New York-ward," said the driver after a long lull. Xman could not bring himself - had he ever been able? - to draw him out. Just when it seemed he had no intention of elaborating, the driver said, "Somebody told me I had the makings of a great one. 'In yourself you are a great one,' that somebody said. 'But I can foresee horror for you in the big city. You'll end up alone, spending your nights alone, a pockmarked fast-food addict taking dictation from the stars in behalf of a universal language.'" Taking a deep breath the driver accelerated for no visible reason. "Then she said something else: I've yet to understand it." Xman never importuned but as if he had, the driver sliding his hand toward the glove compartment and removing a little notebook grumbled, "Oh all right. Since you insist I'll read it." "'You think you are beyond everybody's comprehension: beyond formulation, beyond bracketing. But I can foresee your intelligibility as a remnant, a failure, a nobody ranting and raving against the failed dawn. When your undeniable uniqueness is projected, the die being cast, upon the screen of universal resistance something monstrous will ungraciously take place. In yourself you are great but thrown into the world you cast another shadow.' That's why I never left. But it's sure to be different for you."
I can't believe I forgot to add it, after pursuing eightbitsamurai for his source earlier. This is from Xman, by Michael Brodsky. This will sound precious (it is precious), but I credit Michael Brodsky for derailing my writing career. He derailed it because I, in my mid-20s, could not fathom how somebody like Michael Brodsky could remain rooted in obscurity while others were lauded for work that was nowhere near his standard. If an obvious genius can't get recognition, what help does anyone else have, other than pure fortune? That quote is from the first page of Xman. The novel is 539 pages long and every page is of equal or greater value.
Some dialogue from John Updike's Gertrude and Claudius. Updike crafted beautiful sentences. And, later:“Is a woman’s death less than a man’s, I wonder? I think death for both is exactly as big as it must be, like the moon when it blackens the sun, to eclipse life completely, even to the last breath, which perhaps will be a sigh over opportunities wasted and happiness missed.”
“I cannot believe –” he began carefully, sensing that she might seize the slightest affront as an excuse to flee his presence forever. “It is a possibly heretical article of my own faith,” he began again, “that a creator would not engender so fierce a love in me without allowing in its object the gleam of a response. Can prayer be so futile?”
not conventional in this thread but this one by thenewgreen last week actually resonated a lot with me :) "I miss it all... but everything I miss pales in comparison with everything I'm excited for."
- Chris Harman, A People's History of the World
(yes I'm still on the same book - there are PDF's out there available btw)The prevalence of racism today leads people to think it has always existed, arising from an innate aversion of people from one ethnic background for those from another. Slavery is then seen as a by-product of racism, rather than the other way around.
The Emperor & Horus (The Prequel to The Horus Heresy - Warhammer 40K) Perhaps some defenders went mad with fear. Perhaps the corruption of Chaos ran deeper than anyone suspected. Perhaps some were foolish enough to think that they could negotiate with the ultimate enemy. Whatever the reason, one last vile treachery was to take place. Many units of the Imperial army that had pledged loyalty to the Emperor turned blasphemer even as the Traitor Space Marines made their drop. It was almost as if it were a pre-arranged signal. In one of the basest acts of betrayal in Humanity's history, they turned their weapons on their brother warriors and cut them down like dogs. Thus did the Lions Gate Spaceport fall to the rebels. As the heretics chanted and howled their mad prayers, the air shimmered and slavering daemons emerged from the warp to spread terror and dismay.
- Jack Kerouac, On the RoadI wondered what the Spirit of the Mountain was thinking, and looked up and saw jackpines in the moon, and saw ghosts of old miners, and wondered about it. In the whole eastern dark wall of the Divide this night there was silence and the whisper of the wind, except in the ravine where we roared; and on the other side of the Divide was the great Western Slope, and the big plateau that went to Steamboat Springs, and dropped, and led you to the western Colorado desert and the Utah desert; all in darkness now as we fumed and screamed in our mountain nook, mad drunken Americans in the mighty land. We were on the roof of America and all we could do was yell, I guess--across the night, eastward over the Plains, where somewhere an old man with white hair was probably walking toward us with the Word, and would arrive any minute and make us silent.
From "A distant mirror: The calamitous 14th century" by Barbara Tuchman. And her comments on the death toll and social upheaval brought about by the Black Death (which killed somewhere between 40-60% of the population rich or poor):
Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening--on a lucky day--without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman's Law, as follows: "The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold" (or any figure the reader would care to supply).
Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.
From The Complete Maus by Art SpiegelmanNo darling! To die, it's easy... but you have to struggle for life! Until the last moment we must struggle together! I need you! And you'll see that together we'll survive.
This one is classic. From herman Hesse's Steppenwolf “Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve.”