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March 7 - May 8, 2022
For only through assiduous repetition is it possible to redistribute skewed tendencies.
convenient approximations bring you closest to comprehending the true nature of things.
For instance, supposing that the planet earth were not a sphere but a gigantic coffee table, how much difference in everyday life would that make? Granted, this is a pretty farfetched example; you can’t rearrange facts of life so freely. Still, picturing the planet earth, for convenience sake, as a gigantic coffee table does in fact help clear away the clutter—those practically pointless contingencies such as gravity and the international dateline and the equator, those nagging details that arise from the spherical view. I mean, for a guy leading a perfectly ordinary existence, how many times
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Civilization,” the old man pronounced, “faces serious crises because science is used for evil—or good. I put my trust in science for the sake of pure science.”
Anything to keep my mouth moving. Best method for repolarizing a tired brain.
What do you think the most gruelin’ thing about evolution is?” “I don’t know. Tell me,” I said. “It’s being unable to pick and choose. Nobody chooses to evolve.
It seems to me a lot of trouble in this world has its origins in vague speech. Most people, when they go around not speaking clearly, somewhere in their unconscious they’re asking for trouble.
“Everyone may be ordinary, but they’re not normal.”
Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself.”
“The mind is nothing you use,” I say. “The mind is just there. It is like the wind. You simply feel its movements.”
It is wrong to talk about people who have disappeared.
“When you speak of my hair, are you also speaking about something in you?”
No war is won or lost until the final battle is over.”
And by perfect, I mean complete. It has everything. If you cannot see that, then it has nothing. A perfect nothing.
A body who works bad thinks bad, I always say.”
Many are the women who can take their clothes off seductively, but women who can charm as they dress?
Here the trees and plants and tiny living things partake of a seamless living fabric; in every stone, in every clod of earth, one senses an immutable order.
I cannot tell if the thought is mine or if it has floated loose from some fragment of memory. I have lost so many things. I am so tired.
“Whose war don’t matter. Whose money don’t matter either. That’s what war is.”
Flaws in oneself open you up to others with flaws.
What was lost was lost. There was no retrieving it, however you schemed, no returning to how things were, no going back.
Kindness and a caring mind are two separate qualities. Kindness is manners. It is superficial custom, an acquired practice. Not so the mind. The mind is deeper, stronger, and, I believe, it is far more inconstant.”
Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.
Genius doesn’t specialize; genius is reason in itself.”
I began to feel estranged from my body. I couldn’t see it, and after a while, you start to think the body is nothing but a hypothetical construct.
Stealing memories was stealing time.
“I got most of our memories, but what am I supposed to do with them? In order to make sense, we’d have to be put back together,
Not that the alcohol actually reduced the pain; it just gave the pain a life of its own, apart from mine.
When the sun leaks through again, patch the roof for rain.
what is identity? The cognitive system arisin’ from the aggregate memories of that individual’s past experiences. The layman’s word for this is the mind. No two human beings have the same mind.
Say time’s the length of your toothpick. The amount of information you can pack into it doesn’t have anything t’do with the length. Make the fraction as long as you want. It’ll be finite, but pretty near eternal. Though if you make it a repeatin’ decimal, why, then it is eternal. You understand what that means? The problem’s the software, no relation to the hardware.
it’s not like you’re goin’ t’die. It’s just your conscious mind what’s goin’ t’disappear forever.”
A shadow is the closest thing a person has.
posters have a way of looking better than the real thing: the reality never lived up to the expectation. I didn’t want to end my life disappointed.
But the absence of fighting or hatred or desire also means the opposites do not exist either. No joy, no communion, no love. Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.
the weight of self
All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the ‘perfect’ can live content and oblivious.
Thinking about time was torment. Time is too conceptual. Not that it stops us from filling it in. So much so, we can’t even tell whether our experiences belong to time or to the world of physical things.
Most human activities are predicated on the assumption that life goes on. If you take that premise away, what is there left?
if one has mind, nothing is ever lost, regardless where one goes.
Maybe it’s not a spectacular novel, but it’s very readable. Better that than the other way around.”
I cannot stay in this place, yet I do not want to lose it.
“After sex, you get introspective.”
Death leaves cans of shaving cream half-used.
humanity doesn’t lend itself to generalizations.
Having the violins on the left and the bass on the right doesn’t make the music more profound. It’s just a more complex way of stimulating a bored imagination.”
you’re going to have a miserable future. But overall, you’ll have a happy life.”
Dostoevsky
From my position on the ground, the sky seemed the logical culmination of all existence. The same with the sea. If you look at the sea for days, the sea is all there is.
In taking leave of life, she’d quit her life of her own will;
I don’t know why I felt this, but how could I just walk out on life? It didn’t seem like the responsible thing to do. Even if no one would miss me, even if I left no blank space in anyone’s life, even if no one noticed, I couldn’t leave willingly. Loss was not a skill, not a measure of a life. And yet I still felt I had something to lose.
