Madi > Recent Status Updates

"No one can pull anyone back from anywhere. You save yourself or you remain unsaved."

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can.

"My heart was in his teeth, as he used to say, and he bit down."

"If reading counted as a sport, I'd be a gold medalist."

I can see the potential in this book so far but it's REALLY hard to read past the author's unnecessarily-descriptive text. Unless you're writing classic poetry, I feel like there's no reason for overly fluffed-up text. It's distracting.

Ritualistic cleaning and straightening and checking and organizing made her feel calmer in a world that was out of her control.

I really like her writing style. It's refreshing, and kind of makes the idea of decluttering and organizing.....fun?

not bad so far, but I get really peeved when books don't have chapters

However, if we do discover a complete theory, it should in time be understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists. Then we shall all, [...] be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist. If we find the answer to that, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason-for then we would know the mind of God

There seems to be three possibilities:
1) There really is a complete unified theory, which we will someday discover if we are smart enough.
2) There is no ultimate theory of the universe, just an infinite sequence of theories that describe the universe more and more accurately.
3) There is no theory of the universe; events cannot be predicted beyond a certain extent but occur in a random and arbitrary manner.

Was I thinking about the Buick Roadmaster inside as I sat there next to the crying boy, wanting to put my arm around him and not knowing how? I don’t know. I guess I might have been, but I don’t think we know all the things we’re thinking. Freud might have been full of shit about a lot of things, but that’s not one.

The key first step toward a solution is this: we must make a choice. By we, I mean our global civilization. And therein lies, as Shakespeare named it, "the rub" - because it seems absurd to imagine that we as a species are capable of making a conscious collective decision. And yet that is the task we are now confronting.

He had decided the time had come to put the games away, that’s all. Grown men are frequently incapable of making such decisions [...]

An excerpt from a letter written to Captain Sullenberger:

"Had you not been so skilled and such a lover of life," she wrote, "my father or others like him, in their sky-high buildings, could have perished along with your passengers. As a Holocaust survivor, my father taught me that to save a life is to save the world."

[cont..] ... Someday these answers may seem as obvious to us as the earth orbiting the sun - or perhaps as ridiculous as a tower of tortoises. Only time (whatever that may be) will tell.

What do we know about the universe, and how do we know it? Where did the universe come from, and where is it going? Did the universe have a beginning, and if so, what happened before then? What is the nature of time? Will it ever come to an end? Recent breakthroughs in physics, made possible in part by fantastic new technologies, suggest answers to some of these longstanding questions. [cont...]

"Exploring the Corporate Powers Behind the Way We Eat" by Robert Kenner is an essay that everyone should read.

This book is already so hard to put down.

The best part of this book so far is that each story leaves you with a true, genuine smile on your face. I have't read a book of short stories so well written in so long that weren't of the horror/thriller genre, and I am so pleasantly surprised.

"I will sell it to you with one condition. That you use it.

Make the machine a part of your life. A part of your day. Do not use it a few times, then need room on the table and close it back into its case to sit on a shelf in the back of a closet. Do that and you may never write with it again."

"Here's your handbasket. Enjoy hell," Frank said.

Tom Hanks has surprisingly easy-to-read prose. I'm pleased :)

I'm only 2 stories deep into this collection and I'm already in love. I won this book in a giveaway, and reading the unedited advance reader copy is kind of thrilling. It's like getting a raw peek into Tom Hank's writing process. Yay!

Instead, I keep focusing on the light, on possibilities, on what is good and true. None of us is bound by the past.

I didn't see the point of judging and analyzing a single moment in someone's life.

It's all these choices that we could have made, the things we might have done. We see them with perfect clarity only long after the moment has passed. Just thirty seconds either way, and I wouldn't have this story to tell you. I wouldn't be the same person telling it.

....cont} The price of what I came to see as this miraculous body had been my life.

These were the lovely bones that had grown around my absence: the connections - sometimes tenuous, sometimes made at great cost, but often magnificent - that happened after I was gone. And I began to see things in a way that let me hold the world without me in it. The events that my death wrought were merely the bones of a body that would become whole at some unpredictable time in the future. {cont...

[cont...] A one-sided cajoling and coaching of the young, a one-way loving and desiring of their mates, a single-sided card that could never be signed.

Almost everyone in heaven has someone on Earth they watch, a loved one, a friend, or even a stranger who was once kind, who offered warm food or a bright smile when one of us had needed it. And when I wasn't watching I could hear the others talking to those they loved on Earth: just as fruitlessly as me, I'm afraid. [cont..]

Even with the sound of rain, Lindsey still felt hidden away, tucked safely in an outside corner of the world with the one person she loved more than anyone else.

He had had a moment of clarity about how life should be lived: not as a child or as a woman. They were the two worst things to be.