MS > MS's Quotes

“Los Angeles, he decided, was a profoundly stupid city, and he felt a palpable, if irrational, longing for all things Massachusetts.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met—he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“In 2005, people from the U.S. sent, on average, four hundred sixty text messages a year. Texts were treated and written more like telegrams than like conversations. The brevity lent these early texts an almost poetry.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“Then there are the books I teach every year: Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Johnny Got His Gun, A Farewell to Arms, A Prayer for Owen Meany, some years Wuthering Heights, Silas Marner, Their Eyes Were Watching God, or I Capture the Castle. Those books are like old friends.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry

“A morel, tastiest mushroom there is. Been a long while since I went hunting morels. Here,” he said to me. “Take this and go see if you can find any more along the river.”
― William Kent Krueger, This Tender Land

“Far better, I believe, to be like children and open ourselves to every beautiful possibility, for there is nothing our hearts can imagine that is not so.”
― William Kent Krueger

“Exercise is by far the most potent longevity “drug.” No other intervention does nearly as much to prolong our lifespan and preserve our cognitive and physical function. But most people don’t do nearly enough—and exercising the wrong way can do as much harm as good.”
― Peter Attia MD, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

“The goal of this new medicine—which I call Medicine 3.0—is not to patch people up and get them out the door, removing their tumors and hoping for the best, but rather to prevent the tumors from appearing and spreading in the first place. Or to avoid that first heart attack. Or to divert someone from the path to Alzheimer’s disease. Our treatments, and our prevention and detection strategies, need to change to fit the nature of these diseases, with their long, slow prologues.”
― Peter Attia, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

“My professors said little to nothing about how to help our patients maintain their physical and cognitive capacity as they aged. The word exercise was almost never uttered. Sleep was totally ignored, both in class and in residency, as we routinely worked twenty-four hours at a stretch. Our instruction in nutrition was also minimal to nonexistent.”
― Peter Attia, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

“Another, related issue is that longevity itself, and healthspan in particular, doesn’t really fit into the business model of our current healthcare system. There are few insurance reimbursement codes for most of the largely preventive interventions that I believe are necessary to extend lifespan and healthspan. Health insurance companies won’t pay a doctor very much to tell a patient to change the way he eats, or to monitor his blood glucose levels in order to help prevent him from developing type 2 diabetes. Yet insurance will pay for this same patient’s (very expensive) insulin after he has been diagnosed.”
― Peter Attia, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

“but I now consider exercise to be the most potent longevity “drug” in our arsenal, in terms of lifespan and healthspan. The data are unambiguous: exercise not only delays actual death but also prevents both cognitive and physical decline, better than any other intervention.”
― Peter Attia, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

“In the late 1970s, the average American adult male weighed 173 pounds. Now the average American man tips the scale at nearly 200 pounds.”
― Peter Attia, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

“In the late 1970s, the average American adult male weighed 173 pounds. Now the average American man tips the scale at nearly 200 pounds. In the 1970s, a 200-pound man would have been considered very overweight; today he is merely average. So you can see how in the twenty-first century, “average” is not necessarily optimal.”
― Peter Attia, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

“The good news is that we have tremendous agency over this. Changing how we exercise, what we eat, and how we sleep (see Part III) can completely turn the tables in our favor. The bad news is that these things require effort to escape the default modern environment that has conspired against our ancient (and formerly helpful)”
― Peter Attia, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

“Religion is a culture of faith; science is a culture of doubt. —Richard Feynman”
― Peter Attia, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

“But Kirk stopped me short with a simple, Socratic question. If sleep is so unimportant, he asked, then why hasn’t evolution gotten rid of it?”
― Peter Attia, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

“This may partially explain why watching TV before bed does not seem to affect sleep quite as negatively as playing video games or scrolling social media does, according to research by Michael Gradisar, a sleep researcher and professor of psychology at Flinders University in Australia.”
― Peter Attia, Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity

“If a tree burns in the forest and nobody sees it…”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“The National Weather Service issues a “Fire Weather Watch” when weather and fuel conditions may lead to rapid or dramatic increases in wildfire activity.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“One reason the trees never get very big or very old is because, in spite of all that water, they burn down on a regular basis. They’re designed to. In this way, the circumboreal is truly a phoenix among ecosystems: literally reborn in fire, it must incinerate in order to regenerate, and it does so, in its random patchwork fashion, every fifty to a hundred years. This colossal biome stores as much, if not more, carbon than all tropical forests combined and, when it burns, it goes off like a carbon bomb.”
― John Vaillant, Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World

“For Elizabeth, cooking wasn’t some preordained feminine duty. As she’d told Calvin, cooking was chemistry. That’s because cooking actually is chemistry.”
― Bonnie Garmus, Lessons in Chemistry

“To anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude? —Elon Musk, Saturday Night Live, May 8, 2021 The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. —Steve Jobs”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

“While other entrepreneurs struggled to develop a worldview, he developed a cosmic view.”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

“When I was reporting on Steve Jobs, his partner Steve Wozniak said that the big question to ask was Did he have to be so mean? So rough and cruel? So drama-addicted? When I turned the question back to Woz at the end of my reporting, he said that if he had run Apple, he would have been kinder. He would have treated everyone there like family and not summarily fired people. Then he paused and added, “But if I had run Apple, we may never have made the Macintosh.” And thus the question about Elon Musk: Could he have been more chill and still be the one launching us toward Mars and an electric-vehicle future?”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

“One of his favorites was Robert Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, a novel about a lunar penal colony.”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

“when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.”
― Robert Heinlein

“While Sonny loaded the truck with shovels and gunny sacks, along with gloves, jackets, and helmets—the basics—Lola phoned the other members of the local volunteer fire department. They were already awake because of the storm. With no other fire department to call on out here, neighbors had to take care of each other. Grass was money, especially now, but in this drought it was also explosively combustible. The month before there had been a fire on the other side of the mountains that shot up a plume like a hydrogen bomb. Wildfires were finishing off the West.”
― Lawrence Wright, Mr. Texas

“He later told the Queen’s alumni magazine that the most important thing he learned during his two years there was “how to work collaboratively with smart people and make use of the Socratic method to achieve commonality of purpose,” a skill, like those of industrial relations, that future colleagues would notice had been only partly honed.”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

“Musk also drew another lesson from his time at Scotiabank: he did not like, nor was he good at, working for other people. It was not in his nature to be deferential or to assume that others might know more than he did.”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

“They were impressed and wanted him to work full-time, but he needed to graduate in order to get a U.S. work visa. In addition, he came to a realization: he had a fanatic love of video games and the skills to make money creating them, but that was not the best way to spend his life. “I wanted to have more impact,” he says.”
― Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk