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One good thing about being addicted to sleeping pills is that they don’t call it “addicted”; they call it “habituated.”
My # 1 fear is the acceleration of days. No such thing supposedly, but I swear I can feel
Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters? Old person worry: What if everything I do does?
A few days later, I yelled at him for losing his new lunch box, and he turned to me and said, Are you sure you’re my mother? Sometimes you don’t seem like a good enough person. He was just a kid, so I let it go. And now, years later, I probably only think of it, I don’t know, once or twice a day.
lots of people who are not Native Americans talking about Native Americans.
Q: What is the philosophy of late capitalism? A: Two hikers see a hungry bear on the trail ahead of them. One of them takes out his running shoes and puts them on. “You can’t outrun a bear,” the other whispers. “I just have to outrun you,” he says.
Sylvia tells the audience that the only reason we think humans are the height of evolution is that we have chosen to privilege certain things above other things. For example, if we privileged the sense of smell, dogs would be deemed more evolved. After all, they have about three hundred million olfactory receptors in their noses compared with our six million. If we privileged longevity, it would be bristlecone pines, which can live for several thousand years. And you could make a case that banana slugs are sexually superior to us. They are hermaphrodites who mate up to three times a day.
When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments.
A woman walks into a dentist’s office and says, “I think I’m a moth.” The dentist tells her, “You shouldn’t be here. You should be seeing a psychiatrist …” The woman replies, “I am seeing a psychiatrist.” The dentist says, “Then what are you doing here?” And she says, “Your light was on.”
A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, “You are mad, you are not like us.”
The leaders of Russia, Syria, and America are arguing about who is the best at catching criminals. The secretary-general of the UN decides to give them a test. He releases a rabbit into a forest and tells them they must catch it. The American team goes in. They place animal informants throughout the forest. They question all plant and mineral witnesses. After three months of extensive investigations, they conclude that rabbits do not exist. The Syrian team goes in. After two weeks with no leads, they burn down the forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit. The rabbit was a
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Buddhist practice includes the notion that we have all been born many times before and that we have all been each other’s mothers and fathers and children and siblings. Therefore, we should treat each person we encounter as if they are our beloved.
“No set line between lost and not lost,”
Funny how when you’re married all you want is to be anonymous to each other again, but when you’re anonymous all you want is to be married and reading together in bed. …
One thing they looked into were cat eyes, the technique of giving humans cat eyes or of making their eyes more catlike. The reason is that cat eyes see nearly as well as human eyes during the day, but much better at night. The researchers figured that if everyone had cat eyes, you wouldn’t need so much lighting, and so you could reduce global energy usage considerably.
A man is having terrible dreams. In them, he is being chased by a demon. He seeks counsel from a therapist, who tells him he must turn around and confront the demon or he will never escape it. He vows to do this, but each night in his dreams, he runs again. Finally, he manages to turn around and look straight at the demon. “Why are you chasing me?” he asks it. The demon says, “I don’t know. It’s your dream.”
And then it is another day and another and another, but I will not go on about this because no doubt you too have experienced time.
Do not believe that because you are a revolutionary you must feel sad.
The core delusion is that I am here and you are there.
