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Kindle Notes & Highlights
because to me writing feels like a kind of handicraft. It feels as if I’m knitting a novel.”
Frames of reference are like the constellation of lights, some of them blinking, on an airliner descending toward an airport at night. You see the lights. They imply a structure you can’t see. Inside that frame of reference—those descending lights—is a big airplane with its flaps down expecting a runway.
“Watching a steer force-marched up the ramp to the kill-floor door, as I have done, I need to remind myself that this is not Sean Penn in Dead Man Walking, that in a bovine brain the concept of nonexistence is blissfully absent.”
Any error is everlasting. As Sara told the journalism students, once an error gets into print it “will live on and on in libraries carefully catalogued, scrupulously indexed … silicon-chipped, deceiving researcher after researcher down through the ages, all of whom will make new errors on the strength of the original errors, and so on and on into an exponential explosion of errata.”
There are known knowns—there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
