Cally > Cally's Quotes

“But the real fierceness of desire, the real heat of a passion long continued and withering up the soul of a man, is the craving for identity with the woman that he loves. He desires to see with the same eyes, to touch with the same sense of touch, to hear with the same ears, to lose his identity, to be enveloped, to be supported. For, whatever may be said of the relation of the sexes, there is no man who loves a woman that does not desire to come to her for the renewal of his courage, for the cutting asunder of his difficulties. And that will be the mainspring of his desire for her. We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“The instances of honesty that one comes across in this world are just as amazing as the instances of dishonesty. After forty-five years of mixing with one's kind, one ought to have acquired the habit of being able to know something about one's fellow beings. But one doesn't”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“With each new woman that a man is attracted to there appears to come a broadening of the outlook, or, if you like, an acquiring of new territory. A turn of the eyebrow, a tone of the voice, a queer characteristic gesture—all these things, and it is these things that cause to arise the passion of love.”
― Ford Madox Ford, The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion

“Memories, even your most precious ones, fade surprisingly quickly. But I don’t go along with that. The memories I value most, I don’t ever see them fading.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

“What can we ever gain in forever looking back and blaming ourselves if our lives have not turned out quite as we might have wished? The hard reality is, surely, that for the likes of you and I, there is little choice other than to leave our fate, ultimately, in the hands of those great gentlemen at the hub of this world who employ our services. What is the point in worrying oneself too much about what one could or could not have done to control the course one’s life took? Surely it is enough that the likes of you and I at least try to make our small contribution count for something true and worthy. And if some of us are prepared to sacrifice much in life in order to pursue such aspirations, surely that is in itself, whatever the outcome, cause for pride and contentment.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, while it is all very well to talk of 'turning points', one can surely only recognize such moments in retrospect. Naturally, when one looks back to such instances today, they may indeed take the appearance of being crucial, precious moments in one's life; but of course, at the time, this was not the impression one had. Rather, it was as though one had available a never-ending number of days, months, years in which to sort out the vagaries of one's relationship with Miss Kenton; an infinite number of further opportunities in which to remedy the effect of this or that misunderstanding. There was surely nothing to indicate at the time that such evidently small incidents would render whole dreams forever irredeemable.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed- why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“As I say, I have never in all these years thought of the matter in quite this way; but then it is perhaps in the nature of coming away on a trip such as this that one is prompted towards such surprising new perspectives on topics one imagined one had long ago thought throughly.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“Perhaps it is indeed time I began to look at this whole matter of bantering more enthusiastically. After all, when one thinks about it, it is not such a foolish thing to indulge in - particularly if it is the case that in bantering lies the key to human warmth.”
― Kazuo Ishiguro, The Remains of the Day

“I said that people never change their lives, that in any case one life was as good as another and that I wasn’t dissatisfied with mine here at all.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“That evening Marie came by to see me and asked me if I wanted to marry her. I said it didn’t make any difference to me and that we could if she wanted to. Then she wanted to know if I loved her. I answered the same way I had the last time, that it didn’t mean anything but that I probably didn’t love her. “So why marry me, then?” she said. I explained to her that it didn’t really matter and that if she wanted to, we could get married.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“And the more I thought about it, the more I dug out of memory things I had overlooked or forgotten. I realized then that a man who had lived only a day could easily live for a hundred years in prison. He would have enough memories to keep him from being bored.”
― Albert Camus, The Stranger

“She sat on a worn wooden bench, and read her book, and nibbled on her sandwich. The air was warm syrup, was literally thick with pollen and dandelion clocks and photons moving at the speed of light. An hour passed, then two. I never arrived at the park, wearing the only suit I never had, the one with a hole in the side pocket that no one ever saw.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Enhanced Edition): A Novel

“Chronological living is a kind of lie. That’s why I don’t do it anymore. Existence doesn’t have more meaning in one direction than it does in any other. Completing the days of your life in strict calendar order can feel forced. Arbitrary.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe (Enhanced Edition): A Novel

“Most people I know live their lives moving in a constant forward direction, the whole time looking backward.”
― Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe

“have for a traveling companion James Quayle”
― Willa Sibert Cather, My Antonia

“It’s not easy being a mammal with a big cortex. We have enough neurons to imagine things that don’t exist instead of just focusing on what is. This allows us to improve things, but it also leave us feeling that something is wrong with the world as it is. A vicious cycle often results. The more you make yourself happy by imagining a “better world,” the less invested you are in the world as it is. This can lead to bad decisions that trigger unhappy chemicals, motivating you to live in your imagined world even more. Reality is a disappointment compared to the ideal world that a cortex can imagine.”
― Anonymous

“Every squirt of dopamine ends, alas, and you only get more when your brain sees another chance to approach a reward. The fleetingness of dopamine was illuminated by a recent monkey study. The animals were trained to do a task and get rewarded with spinach. After a few days, they were rewarded with squirts of juice instead of spinach. The monkeys’ dopamine soared. That seared the information: “This reeeally meets your needs” into their neurons. The experimenters continued giving the monkeys juice, and in a few days something curious happened. No dopamine spike. The monkeys’ brains stopped reacting to rewards that just came on its own. In human terms, they took it for granted. When there’s no new information, there’s no need for dopamine. When you need to record new survival rewards or new ways of getting them, your dopamine is there. This experiment has a dramatic finale. The experimenters switched back to spinach, and the monkeys reacted with fits of rage. They screamed and threw the spinach back at the researchers. They had learned to expect juice, and even though it no longer made them happy, losing it made them mad”
― Anonymous

“Social pain does not trigger endorphin the way physical pain does, except for a brief laugh or cry. A broken heart doesn’t trigger endorphin the way a broken bone does. In the past, daily life held so much physical pain that social pain was secondary.Today, we spend less time suffering the pain of physical labor, predator attack, or deteriorating disease. Our attention is free to focus on the pain of disappointed social expectations. This leaves us feeling that life is more painful even though it’s less painful than in the past. 33”
― Anonymous

“Mammals live in herds and packs and troops because there’s safety in numbers. A mammal doesn’t consciously decide whether to stick with the herd or strike out on his own when he wakes up each morning.Instead, his brain produces a good feeling near the group, and a bad feeling when separated. Cortisol surges when a herd animal can’t see at least one of his group, and oxytocin surges when he’s reunited with”
― Anonymous

“Attachments make mammals what they are. We care for our young, which make it possible for our young to be born without survival skills. We learn from experience instead of being born pre-programmed.Reptiles, by contrast, strike out on their own the moment they’re born. Instead of relying on parental care, a young lizard starts running the instant he hatches from his shell. If he doesn’t run fast enough, a parent eats him! the better to recycle the energy into another sibling instead of letting a predator get it. Fish don’t even wait for their eggs to hatch. They swim off the moment their eggs are fertilized, to pursue other interests. Plants send their seed into the wind and never find out whether it grows into mighty oaks”
― Anonymous

“Because always,’ he thinks, ‘when anything gets to be a habit, it also manages to get a right good distance away from truth and fact.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“And he was not old enough to talk and say nothing at the same time.”
― William Faulkner, Light in August

“Your bottle cap collection can’t protect you from harm, of course. But when your brain is screaming “do something,” anything that triggers happy chemicals masks unhappy chemicals. Distraction is not the best survival strategy when your cortisol is triggered by a lion. But when your boss is in a bad mood, it’s nice to have a way to mask your bad feelings”
― Anonymous

“Our brains were not designed for us to sit around contemplating what we already have. They were not designed to trigger excitement for no reason. They were designed for us to keep finding new ways to promote survival”
― Anonymous

“Winning the love of a higher-status person is a widespread strategy for stimulating serotonin. Of course, we don’t consciously equate love with status. But when a highstatus person of the right gender notices you, your brain lights up. Your neurochemistry screams “Go toward this. It is very good for your survival. ” Even bonobos, the apes known for their sexual dynamism, compete vigorously for high-status partners”
― Anonymous

“But our brains are different from mice. Their cortex is tiny, which means their ability to learn from experience is tiny. They are built to run on innate rather than learned circuits. Our cortex is huge because we are designed to fill it up with acquired knowledge. We are not meant to run on pre-loaded programs. Every creature in nature runs on as few neurons as possible because neurons are metabolically expensive. They consume more oxygen and glucose than an active muscle. It takes so much energy to keep a neuron alive that they actually make it harder to survive. Neurons only promote survival if you really get your money’s worth out of them, by wiring them up with survival-relevant information. Natural selection gave humans a gargantuan number of neurons. That means we were meant to use the experience we’ve stored in our neurons, not to ignore”
― Anonymous

“When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax and use more normal means of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Those who believe that art proceeds from a healthy, and not from a diseased, faculty of the mind will take what he shows them as a revelation, not of what we ought to be but of what we are at a given time and under given circumstances; that is, as a limited revelation but revelation nevertheless.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“It took me a long time and much painful boomeranging of my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man