The Unreality of Memory Quotes

“As the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio famously said, “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“Often, when something bad happens, I have a strange, instinctual desire for things to get even worse—I think of a terrible outcome and then wish for it. I recognize the pattern, but I don’t understand it. It’s as though my mind is running simulations and can’t help but prefer the most dramatic option—as though, in that eventuality, I could enjoy it from the outside.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“My responsibility may be infinite, but my empathy is not, and there is more evil in the world at any given moment than I feel physically capable of processing, much less addressing with due thought and care.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“These seem to be real questions we're wrestling with - where do I focus my anxiety so that I can feel like a good citizen in an anxious society? We believe we need to worry about the right problems, even if we can't solve them.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“In the era of fake news - a natural extension of the era of news proper - we don't just look to the media for facts, we look to it for narratives.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“Reality is different. We have to discover what is out there—what is real and what is merely a product of our imagination.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“I ignore the evils that support my quality of life, to which I've become accustomed. We've arranged to make the evils that benefit us invisible.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“The nuances of the terminology reflect degrees of stigma, but they influence stigma too - the names we give to people's discomfort affect how uncomfortable those people make us.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: Notes on Life in the Pre-Apocalypse

“I feel this way all the time now.Nothing is safe. Everything's fine.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“It's the spectacle, I think, that makes a disaster a disaster. A disaster is not defined simply by damage or death count; deaths by smoking or car wrecks are not a disaster because they are meted out, predictable. A disaster must not only blindside us, but be witnessed, and rewitnessed, in public.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“Perhaps it's comforting to believe that disasters are the result of some fixable "fatal flaw," and not an inevitable part of the unfolding of history.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“Perhaps it's comforting to believe that disasters are the result of some fixable "fatal flaw," and not an inevitable part of the unfolding history.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“Sometimes I think evil is merely cumulative, an effect of scale, a swarm intelligence. If it was just two boys who found each other in the woods, wouldn't they band together, become friends? Or would they become a group in search of an enemy?”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“Societal mores are in place not to maintain the natural order but to enforce unnatural order.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“There is a richness of detail in the media of suffering that tests the limits of our empathy - if not asking too much, then asking too often.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“The value of a life, its worthiness of our moral regard, is determined by social relations.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“Especially now, when we're likely past the point of avoiding a climate calamity of our own creation, disasters can feel like karmic punishment. But the earth is not a vengeful god - just an indifferent one.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“Ecological disasters create the conditions of war, while giving us no one to bargain with - no one to fight or beg mercy from. Science improves our predictive power, but those predictions are often just a preview of the coming brute reality. While they may go some way toward preparing us psychologically, they can't in themselves protect us.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: Notes on Life in the Pre-Apocalypse