Kayce Cragan

“To an economist, the strategy is obvious. Since even a penny is more valuable than nothing, it makes sense for Zelda to accept an offer as low as a penny—and, therefore, it makes sense for Annika to offer just a penny, keeping $19.99 for herself. But, economists be damned, that’s not how normal people played the game. The Zeldas usually rejected offers below $3. They were apparently so disgusted by a lowball offer that they were willing to pay to express their disgust. Not that lowball offers happened very often. On average, the Annikas offered the Zeldas more than $6. Given how the game works, an offer this large was clearly meant to ward off rejection. But still, an average of $6—almost a third of the total amount—seemed pretty generous. Does that make it altruism? Maybe, but probably not. The Ultimatum player making the offer has something to gain—the avoidance of rejection—by giving more generously. As often happens in the real world, seemingly kind behaviors in Ultimatum are inextricably tied in with potentially selfish motivations.”
― Steven D. Levitt, SuperFreakonomics, Illustrated edition: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance

“One Sunday morning the warm sun came up and - pop! - out of the egg came a tiny and very hungry caterpillar.”
― Eric Carle, The Very Hungry Caterpillar

“Life goes one way only, and whatever opinions you hold about the past have nothing to do with anything but your own damn weakness. Nothing changes what already happened. It will always have happened. You either let it break you down or you don’t. A simple enough lesson, yet hard for Luce to learn. She couldn’t”
― Charles Frazier, Nightwoods

“there would be no powerful will binding hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow creature…And yet she had loved him- sometimes. Often she had not. What did it matter! What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being.”
― Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour