Wonderworks Quotes

“Our drones, our phones, our algorithms, our virtual realities, and our smart homes have all been built to shuttle around meals and data and other stuffs, turning space-time into an extension of our needs and wants.”
― Angus Fletcher, Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature

“For the longer we suspend our judgments, the more accurate our subsequent verdicts become. This valuable fact has been uncovered by researchers who’ve spent decades probing the mechanics of better decision-making, only to discover that the key is simply more time and more information. Which is to say: reserving our judgment until the last possible moment.”
― Angus Fletcher, Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature

“there are a number of judgments that we can suspend permanently, including most of our judgments about other people. Our brain is constantly making such judgments. It looks at strangers on the street—and judges them. It looks at celebrities in magazines—and judges them. It looks at family members and colleagues and friends in homes and offices and restaurants—and judges them. These judgments feel instantly good to our neurons; they deliver pleasant microdoses of emotional superiority. But in the long run, they make us anxious, incurious, and less happy, so we can improve our long-term mental well-being if we suspend them.”
― Angus Fletcher, Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature

“There’s only one kind of apology that cannot fail to generate empathy: an apology that instantly convinces us of its sincerity. In real life, no apology can do that. There will always be skeptics, and appropriately so. The truth of an apology doesn’t lie in its words. It lies in the mind behind those words, and that mind can never be perceived with total certainty. But in literature, there are apologies that can instantly convince us of their sincerity. That’s because literature allows us to peer into characters’ heads, inspecting their minds for an apology’s neural proof: remorse. If we see that remorse, then we know that the apology is genuine. And, indeed, if we see that remorse, then we don’t even need a formal apology. The character can simply wail, collapse, or gibber incoherently, and we’ll feel: That’s because he regrets what he did. That’s because he accepts blame and repents his mistake. This is precisely how we come to feel about the title character of Sophocles’s tragedy Oedipus Tyrannus.”
― Angus Fletcher, Wonderworks: The 25 Most Powerful Inventions in the History of Literature