A > A's Quotes

“Agustín había escrito que Jesús es la vía recta que nos salva del laberinto circular en que andan los impíos;”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Cuentos completos

“Twentieth-century scholarship, advancing the modern human conceit, conspired against our ability to notice the divergent, layered, and conjoined projects that make up worlds.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“contamination, that is, transformation through encounter.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“Rather than seeing only the expansion-and-conquest strategies of relentless individuals, we must look for histories that develop through contamination.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“Why don’t we use these stories in how we know the world? One reason is that contaminated diversity is complicated, often ugly, and humbling. Contaminated diversity implicates survivors in histories of greed, violence, and environmental destruction.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“Translation, in Shiho Satsuka’s sense, is the drawing of one world-making project into another.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“The concept of assemblage—an open-ended entanglement of ways of being—is more useful. In an assemblage, varied trajectories gain a hold on each other, but indeterminacy matters.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“This machine is not a total institution, which we spend our lives inside; instead, it translates across living arrangements, turning worlds into assets.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“Interspecies relations draw evolution back into history because they depend on the contingencies of encounter. They do not form an internally self-replicating system. Instead, interspecies encounters are always events, “things that happen,” the units of history. Events can lead to relatively stable situations, but they cannot be counted on in the way self-replicating units can; they are always framed by contingency and time. History plays havoc with scalability. The only way to create scalability is to repress change and encounter”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“disturbance refers to an open-ended range of unsettling phenomena.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“the curious conjunctures of collaborative survival.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“The sustainability of nature, he said, never just falls into place; it must be brought out through that human work that also brings out our humanity.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“Descriptive means site-specific, that is, attuned to indeterminate encounters and thus nonscalable.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“Without stories of progress, the world has become a terrifying place. The ruin glares at us with the horror of its abandonment.”
― Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins

“There are various magazines and newspapers that I sometimes buy, but reading them usually gives me an unspecified sense of guilt. A feeling that there’s something I haven’t done, something I’ve forgotten, that I’m not up to the demands of the task, that in some essential way I’m lagging behind the rest.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“Without any thought but with religious zeal, young people believe in statistics.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“The aim of evolution is purely aesthetic—it’s not to do with adaptation at all. Evolution is about beauty, about achieving the most perfect form for each shape.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“It’s easy to harm and injure us, to smash up our intricately assembled, bizarre existence.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“Sometimes I think that only the sick are truly healthy.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“And it was a good thing he had his Ailments. Being healthy is an insecure state and does not bode well. It’s better to be ill in a quiet way, then at least we know what we’re going to die of.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

“Ultimately, as I tell my students, this isn’t just one way to make decisions. It is the correct way.”
― Emily Oster, Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong-and What You Really Need to Know

“Art changes the opinion of the masses, as much as science does.”
― Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries

“Paris was beauty and power, a mysterious, frightening entity”
― Annie Ernaux, The Years

“people needed sacrifices to have a sense of their own causality in the face of God.”
― Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story