MD > MD's Quotes

“Our task in life consists precisely in a form of letting go of fear and expectations, an attempt to purely give oneself to the impact of the present.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“IT WAS AT THIS POINT that the idea of “shaking the snow globe,” as one neuroscientist described the psychedelic experience, came to seem more attractive to me than frightening, though it was still that too. After more than half a century of its more or less constant companionship, one’s self—this ever-present voice in the head, this ceaselessly commenting, interpreting, labeling, defending I—becomes perhaps a little too familiar. I’m not talking about anything as deep as self-knowledge here. No, just about how, over time, we tend to optimize and conventionalize our responses to whatever life brings. Each of us develops our shorthand ways of slotting and processing everyday experiences and solving problems, and while this is no doubt adaptive—it helps us get the job done with a minimum of fuss—eventually it becomes rote. It dulls us. The muscles of attention atrophy.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“The usual antonym for the word “spiritual” is “material.” That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry—that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I’m inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for “spiritual” might be “egotistical.” Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that spectrum needn’t reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic—that is, more spiritual—idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations-a kind of controlled hallucination.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Here lies Morris, a good man and friend. He enjoyed the finer points of civilized life but never shied away from a hearty adventure or hard work. He died a free man, which is more than most people can say, if we are going to be honest about it. Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven't the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood - weak blood, diluted - and their memories aren't worth a goddamned thing, you will see what I mean.”
― Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers

“Remember about mountains: what they are made of is not what made them.”
― John McPhee, Annals of the Former World

“If Pietrok-111 was a one-horse town, Pietrok-112 was the glue factory where that horse went to die.”
― Claire North, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August

“But in my experience it’s rarely the parting that is memorable, unless it’s a death. They are always hurried, awkward affairs. Never enough time to say what you wish you had said. You must trust that your feelings are known, and that you will be remembered as you were.”
― Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

“Eberhard died. I do not wish to articulate the details, for a form of spiritual or emotional rift in time and space was created on that day, and no matter how many years pass, I can always stretch back and know that pain as though the hole in me were being torn anew, or the sorrow may reach through with its icy finger and fell me when I’m least prepared. It is a part of me. A shadow that accompanies my shadow. There is no healing.”
― Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

“If you put nothing down,” she replied, “the people you love will only remember the skeleton of your experience. Your mind dies with you. If you must write for someone, write for Skuld. Write for me.”
― Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

“From the time I'd been a precocious, skeptical child, the idea of simply winking out like a light, or a star, was more than enough to nearly paralyze me with existential misery. I knew I would cease to be, and yet I could not comfortably imagine a world without me in it. It's a form of narcissism, sure, but how do we live from one day to the next without convincing ourselves of our own fallacious importance?”
― Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

“So you must make the best choices you can, knowing they may lead you astray, but proceeding boldly lest your life become one long monotonous drift between death and your last interesting choice.”
― Nathaniel Ian Miller, The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven

“So, in a sense, capitalism is a monopoly. Without competition, capitalism has bent towards the agglomeration of profit and power in the hands of relatively few families, corporations, industries and governments. The coercion of twentieth century dictatorships as methods of individual persuasion and control has been replaced by marketing, far more benign and effective. Meanwhile vasts rafts of people--entire regions even--sit becalmed in seas of poverty and resentment”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“Left unchecked, the brain's reward system for moral indignation leads to the Spanish Inquisition, to witch trials--and to what goes on daily on Facebook and Twitter. Outrage keeps us engaged better than almost anything. This engagement allows social media apps to sell more ads, fueling their bottom line. IN priming our natural outrage, an impulse that evolved to keep us alive, social media apps have us tearing each other apart. Like dope dealers--just peddling outrage.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth

“We live in a time when drug traffickers behave like multinational corporations and corporations behave like traffickers.”
― Sam Quinones, The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth