Steve

“Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.”
― Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye

“It is a truism among researchers into smell that all human subjects behave as if they themselves do not smell like humans, because all humans smell bad.”
― Lyall Watson, Jacobson's Organ: And the Remarkable Nature of Smell

“I sometimes think it would be beneficial if people thought of each other as “historical factorials.” Thus, (Myrtle!) would be understood not just as present-day Myrtle but as the product of all her past experiences.”
― John Allen Paulos, Beyond Numeracy: Ruminations of a Numbers Man

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”
― Franz Kafka