tag/quotes

I just finished Steven Pinkers excellent "How The Mind Works" -- in reading it electronic form I made a backlog of quotes from it, often him quoting others but some new passages as well...

Friday is covering Saturday and Sunday so I can't have Saturday and Sunday if I don't go through Friday.

This is an example of how children spontaneously develop there own space and motion metaphors

I don't like spinach, and I'm glad I don't, because if I liked it I would eat it, and I just hate it.

No, but for two brothers or eight cousins.

Geneticist humor!

It takes a mind debauched by learning to carry the process of making the natural seem strange so far as to ask 'why' of any instinctive human act.

If there were a verb meaning 'to believe falsely,' it would not have any significant first person, present indicative.

There's one way to find out if a man is honest: ask him; if he says yes, you know he's crooked.

Was it a millionaire who said 'Imagine no possessions'?

Natural selection does not forbid cooperation and generosity; it just makes them difficult engineering problems, like stereoscopic vision.

Parental love causes the fundamental paradox of politics: no society can be simultaneously fair, free, and equal. If it is fair, people who work harder can accumulate more. If it is free, people will give their wealth to their children. But then it cannot be equal, for some people will inherit wealth they did not earn. Ever since Plato called attention to these tradeoffs in The Republic, most political ideologies can be defined by the stance they take on which of these ideals should yield.

In the laboratory, some early experiments claimed that men and women showed identical physiological arousal to a pornographic passage. The men, however, showed a bigger response to the neutral passage in the control condition than the women showed to the pornography. The so-called neutral passage, which had been chosen by the female investigators, described a man and a woman chatting about the relative merits of an anthropology major over pre-med. The men found it highly erotic!

This says so much to be about the male condition. Like Susan Sarandon's character says in "Bull Durham", "a guy'll listen to anything if he thinks it's foreplay"...

Theology is the effort to explain the unknowable in terms of the not worth knowing.

The conclusion of the book was a pitch for the idea that maybe brains aren't smart enough to understand themselves; that we're darn lucky to be able to figure out so much of the universe, from atomic theory to art, with a brain that was basically setup to help us navigate complex social relationships and manage hunting and gathering... as he puts it:

We can well imagine creatures with fewer cognitive faculties than we have: dogs to whom our language sounds like "Blah-blah-blah-Ginger-blah-blah," rats that cannot learn a maze with food in the prime-numbered arms, autistics who cannot conceive of other minds, children who cannot understand what all the fuss around sex is all about, neurological patients who see every detail in a face except whose it is, stereoblind people can understand a stereogram as a problem in geometry but cannot see it pop out in depth. If stereoblind people did not know better, they might call 3-D vision a miracle, or claim that it just is and needs no explanation, or write it off as some kind of trick.

So why should there not be creatures with more cognitive faculties than we have, or with different ones? They might readily grasp how free will and consciousness emerge from a brain and how meaning and morality fit into the universe, and would be amused by the religious and philosophical headstands we do to make up for our blankness when facing these problems. They could try to explain the solutions to us, but we would not understand the explanations.

---

Wish I had someone who was an advocate for divs vs tables, layout-wise, and not sick of arguing about it. To me it seems that tables provide a robust, flexible, "stretchy" grid-style layout, and avoid some of the weird alignment crap you can get into with float and overflow issues with div-- but I hate designers thinking I'm sort of Web 1.0 baboon for thinking this way. It's not like I'm advocating giving up CSS styling...

---

Skywriters at the Public Garden- it says INTL AIRSHOW- you know skywriting is cool but the dot-matrix type seems a bit lazy... More Usenet fun- my favorite .signature quotes... i had a Perl script that would pick a random one each time, and glue it onto my contact information.

Stars and People are made of the same stuff

Now is the winter of our discontent-- and I'm makin' snowballs!

There are no "facts"-- there is only *the fact* that man, every man everywhere in the world, is on his way to ordination. Some men take the long route and some take the short route. Every man is working out his own way and nobody can be of help except by being kind, generous, and patient.

All life is 6-to-5 against, just enough to keep you interested

I remember two things very well, and that is that ladies are pretty and money pays the bills when you get it

"The time has come," the walrus said, / "To speak of manic things,
Of shots and shouts, and sealing dooms / Of commoners and kings."

It is not true that life is one damn thing after another--
it's one damn thing over and over.

There is no god and Murphy is his prophet

Well, we all got misery, but it passes, it always passes!

Insecurity knocks once in a while. Invite her in. Sit down, have coffee with her. And once you have heard Insecurity out for a while, take that sugar spoon and poke her in the eye.

(My mom loves that last one)

Context is strawberries

When life gives you poop, make poop juice.

"Looking back on your life, what would you say satisfied you most?"
"...I'd say women."

And isn't sanity really just a one trick pony anyway? I mean all you get is one trick, rational thinking, but when you're good and crazy, oooh oooh oooh, the sky is the limit!

The question is complex and life is short

when you see infrared we're all luminescent

The cat is trying to open the door on the hinge side. I laugh, then realize that I make the same mistake with people, ideas, and doors, too.

"Life's too short to worry about it"

"I want to live like I type- fast, and with lots of mistakes"

Obscenity, by itself, is the last refuge of the vulgarian and the crutch of the inarticulate motherf**ker.

"I'm going to kill everyone in this room."
"Now that's DARN rude."

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies--
'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'

"I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different." --Kurt Vonnegut

We're all soldiers in the war against entropy.

I spent an interesting evening recently with a grain of salt.

No why. Just here.

But in my arms till break of day / Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me / The entirely beautiful.

If I cannot be free, I'll be cheap

"I'm out to shave with Occam's Razor"

We don't know if there's a god- but there *are* women...

How do we stop an elephant if it goes berserk? What do we do? Do we use
an AK-47? An M-16? An AR-15?... Frankly, would that stop an elephant?
I really doubt it. Do they have a bazooka?

I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was. . . an arctic wilderness.

The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews.

When I'm clicking through the hundreds of E-mail messages that await me each morning, sometimes I imagine I'm a mighty information whale, sifting through thousands of tiny (but nutritious!) krill bits. Yum!

So many women, so little nerve.

Good friends, good books and a sleepy conscience: This is the ideal life.

The ant's a centaur in his dragon world

I think art should be in the place in our culture where religion used to be. Where magic used to be, there should be art.

We come together making chance into starlight

We don't know who discovered water, but we're certain it wasn't a fish.

As they say in my country, the only thing that separates us from the animals are mindless superstition and pointless ritual.

Since God is silent, man is his own master; he must live in a disenchanted world, submit everything to criticism, and make his own way.

[Stegosaurus] Two words: spiked tail. "Oh, so you're sneaking up
behind me to eat my delicious body? WHAM! Spikes! For you! In your head!"

Is God willing to prevent evil but not able? Then he is impotent.
Is he able but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Whence then is evil?

It is absurd to divide people into good and bad.
People are either charming or tedious.

Sleep... Those little slices of death; O how I LOATH them!

So we keep asking, over and over, / Until a handful of earth
Stops our mouths-- / But is that an answer?

...the greatest bargain since Jesus bar-Miriam was was sold for thirty pieces of silver to the Romans, who, God wot, have been selling him ever since...

i seem to be constantly reminded that everything is temporary.
the older i get, the more this bothers me.

Striving for excellence, like a moth beating itself
to death on the side of a light bulb.

Without music, life would be a mistake. ...I would only believe in a God that knew how to dance.

> All positive integers are interesting! Any doubters?
No, no, no. All positive integers are boring. Proof by contradiction:

Car broke down / Wife left me.
Life is lite, / and then Hefty.

Tiger got to hunt, / Bird got to fly; / Man got to sit and wonder,
"Why, why, why?" / Tiger got to sleep, / Bird got to land, /
Man got to tell himself he understand.

Lena Dunham just released a very brief kindle book, "is it evil not to be sure?", selections from a short-form/snippet journal she kept as she started college. In the introduction she writes

If I could be didactic about just one thing (though I hope to God that limit is never imposed upon me), it would be my belief that young people, young women in particular, must commit their experiences to paper. If for no other reason than this: only you will ever have these particular experiences and we won’t want to have lost them after you go, or forget, or grow up and get terrible snow boots.

(this after mentioning her moms Oscar Wilde-ish penchant for the devastating bon mot, like when she told her shrink she could never take advice from someone with such awful snow boots)

It's a good mandate. Here were some of my favorite pieces of the book:

This was the first time I’m realizing that snowflakes are actually shaped like snowflakes. I always thought it was an abstract thing like drawings of hearts.

A boy shared his umbrella with me and I got his name wrong and I loved being able to feel powerful in those two ways.

I've taken to walking around the dorm in slips.

Its terrible to ride a bike in the cold.

we’re dunk on the floor in the dark. I say “your breath smells like babies.” You say “that’s because I just ate a baby.”

I’m learning that just because someone is smart, funny and good in bed, it doesn’t mean they’re nice

ocean meeting shore and the wet spot between

the French word he messaged her has a very specific meaning: to patch something up, but quickly and probably badly

we’ve nearly nicknamed him “hey, you can’t just throw my legs over your shoulders or wherever you please.”

I'm really fond of this genre... young and precocious and observant, mostly in the present tense, and usually romantically longing, so often written to an absent "you". I think of a spiral bound journal with a red cover a friend let me post excerpts from once upon a time, also some of Sandra Bernhard's books ("Lips kissed for the first time are kissed forever." is a good line, and once the entire content of a chapter was "I wish you had, but I'm glad you didn't.")

I guess I kind of dabbled in that form in my "Palm Pilot Journal" in the late 90s, http://kirk.is/khftcea/ , especially the early entries. I hadn't set out for it to be public, but EB kind of barged into, and my hope for attention or posterity has always been stronger than my sense of privacy. (I have a visceral memory of the device, transcribing that romantic moping and of course quotes from all over, using the scrawny little stylus on the spinach green monochrome screen.) In retrospect the 3 or 4 years I spent on it are dwarfed by the time I've been blogging since, but there was something beautiful in writing that way, and I kind of miss it, or maybe miss being the person who would do that.

---

I am glad the new Ghostbusters trailer seem so solid... the old one got such guff, I think for sexist reason.

But I am totally onboard the Kate McKinnon fan club. So many expressions.

---

Man, I can't even do a proper riffle shuffle.

Actually I can't think of anything I do as well as these guys do card manipulations.

---

I just finished Penn Jillette's "Presto!: How I Made Over 100 Pounds Disappear and Other Magical Tales". The kickstart to his losing 100 lbs was two weeks of NOTHING but potatoes, but that was mostly just to get him away from the super flavors of "SAD", the "Standard American Diet". (Then it switches to something like "Whole Plant" emphasis. It's pretty dang spartan overall.)

I'd like to flatter myself by seeing some similarities in me and him, though that's obviously a stretch (despite finding out he's been keep a daily diary for years, like I do.) I think the most critical difference springs from this:

Live outside the law. Be honest. It's easy once you get there, but it's difficult to start. You're bucking the whole system. The law says make things easy-- so do things that are hard! Everything you love was hard to do: juggling, playing bebop jazz on upright bass, catching a bullet in your teeth, working with Teller, being married, raising children-- even reading Moby-Dick was hard. All the things that make life worth living take work.

Actually Penn quotes Neil Young on how I end up feeling:

It's hard enough losing without the confusion of knowing I tried.

...I have a hard time shaking this fixed mindset that causes me to seek out all the ego-gratifying low hanging fruits. A useful talent, sometimes. Though also I've been thinking about how it has shaped the music I like, which tends to prefer the accessible to the subtle; I think though I have enough "novelty seeking" that it keeps me out of the worst of the ruts.

Another passage I found striking:

I worry a little about the young adults of today. I worry that they aren't sexting quite enough and won't have enough naked pictures and porn video of themselves. I worry there's still too much false information about society's unnecessary stigma about sex. There's stuff in the news all the time about college students sexting, but still reports say that fewer than half of young adults are sexting pictures of themselves. I don't want to see pictures of young people naked. I'm old and I'm creepy, but I'm not that creepy. What I want is pictures of my friends and myself when we were twenty. I want just what at least half of young people are going to have when they themselves are old and creepy. The news sources I read (which are for old people like me) fret about young adults not understanding that when they post nude pictures of themselves, those pictures will never go away. That's a feature, not a bug, and fortunately at least half of young adults know that.

---

I understand immediately why people collect stamps. I understand why people play polo. I can relate to every sexual kink I've ever seen video of.

---

Horses don't eat anything but plants, and they build strong bodies that some women find sexy in a way that's a little creepy.

---

It frightens me, the awful truth of how sweet life can be.

---

My dad loved soup and taught me to love soup. He also taught me to love ritual jokes. There were certain jokes he did every time the chance came up. Every time my dad had soup, he'd say, "Once I had soup while my nose was running, and I thought I'd never finish."

That is a TERRIFIC dad joke! So delightfully gross.

2020 UPDATE: I was surprised I never mentioned

In 2012 I went on The Celebrity Apprentice with Donald Trump, who has hair that looks like cotton candy made of piss.

---

August Blender of Love Finished Nicholson Baker "The Fermata" - I've always liked this author with his extreme sensitivity to the details of the inanimate objects of our life... and some of the animate one. Penn Jillette gave him a shout out in his book on his diet, so I picked this one up. It's the perviest thing I've read in a while, using the same scifi trope later presented in the film Cashback, both being about a young man who can gains the power to freeze time, and uses that poewr to undress women. Both justify it to themselves and their audience that they do it to see the women's hidden beauty, and take care not to not have the women alarmed once time restarts.

(Baker dabbles a bit more into the technical details of what such a power might actually be like, and why and how the whole rest of the universe isn't absolutely static, plunged into darkness with photons stopped in their tracks, etc... it reminds me of H.F. Saint's "Memoirs of an Invisible Man" that did the same for invisibility... the title character has to take care eating transparent food (broths, clear gelatin, etc) since the food doesn't share his invisibility until he digests it...)

Anyway, some nice quotes:

Women are much more in touch with the backs of themselves than men are: they can reach higher up on their back, and do so daily to unfasten bras; they can clip and braid their hair; they can keep their rearward blouse-tails smoothly tucked into their skirts. They give thought to how the edges of their underpants look through their pocketless pants from the back.

I had not been aware before that moment of the straightforward erogenousness of a ring: it suddenly occurred to me that the sides of the fingers are sensitive in an upper-thigh sort of way, and that the singling out of that fourth vulnerable shy finger, the planet Neptune of fingers, which otherwise gets no unique treatment in life and does very little on its own except control the C on the high school clarinet or type the number two and the letter X, to be held and gently stimulated forever by an expensive circle of gold is really quite surprisingly sexual.

I wanted to tell Joyce these dreams. But she wasn't my lover, and lovers are the only people who will put up with hearing your dreams.

(Fingertips are so durable. They don't even explode when you use them as temp shoehorns; they just tingle for a second as your impassive heel forces itself past.)

I guess I had simply forgotten that there is no satisfactory autoerotic substitute for a kiss.

Peeple of zee wurl, relax.

This is what a parrot says, I think it's a reference to the work of Joe Brainard that I need to check out

(Switters's granny, by contrast, wore an outsized, owlishly round, horn-rimmed pair that made her look rather exactly like the late theatrical agent, Swifty Lazar.)

FWIW I'm pretty sure Swifty Lazar was the inspiration for that old Six Flags commercials with the dancing old man Mr. Six -

"But what about self-esteem?"
"Heh! Self-esteem is for sissies. Accept that you're a pimple and try to keep a lively sense of humor about it. That way lies grace--and maybe even glory."

Tennessee Williams once wrote, "We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it." In a certain sense, the playwright was correct. Yes, but oh! What a view from that upstairs window! What Tennessee failed to mention was that if we look out of that window with an itchy curiosity and a passionate eye; with a generous spirit and a capacity for delight; and, yes, the language with which to support and enrich the things we see, then it DOESN'T MATTER that the house is burning down around us. It doesn't matter. Let the motherfucker blaze!

"I know what you're saying. But it isn't because words are inadequate. I won't go that far."
"Certain things words can't convey."
"Oh, but they can. Because those things you're referring to are . . . well, if they're not actually made of words or derived from words, at least inhabit words: language is the solution in which they're suspended. Even love ultimately requires a linguistic base."

but the poet, Andrei Codrescu, once wrote that 'Physical intimacy is only a device for opening the floodgates of what really matters: words.'

The Syrians in general are sympathetic people, nice people. It is only the Muslim Brotherhood that makes the problem for Christians, but, then, fundamentalists are the same everywhere, are they not?"
"Yeah. Their desperate craving for simplicity sure can create complications. And their pitiful longing for certainty sure can make things unsteady."

"Et tu?" she asked breathily. "And you? Are you sure?" "I'm sure I want every youness of you," he answered,

You only live twice: once after you're born and once before you die. --Basho

"I love myself," he said. "But it's unrequited."

Working my way through Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus is one of his later books (1990) and is disturbingly modern with its thoughts on messing with the climate (though with a tinge of expecting glaciers for a new ice age, a sentiment I remember from a Barney Miller episode) and white folks who want lots of guns.

---

I AM NOT writing this book for people below the age of 18, but I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.

In terms of basketball alone, almost everybody has to lose. A high percentage of the convicts in Athena, and now in this much smaller institution, devoted their childhood and youth to nothing but basketball and still got their brains knocked out in the early rounds of some darn fool tournament.

---

The lesson I myself learned over and over again when teaching at the college and then the prison was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren't funny or scary, or couldn't make you rich, the heck with them.

---

"I have to tell you, though, that you are not the first person to say the game was all over for the human race. I'm sure that even in Egypt before the first pyramid was constructed, there were men who attracted a following by saying, 'It's all over now.' "

"What is different about now as compared with Egypt before the first pyramid was built--" Ed began.

"And before the Chinese invented printing, and before Columbus discovered America," Jason Wilder interjected.

"Exactly," said Bergeron.

"The difference is that we have the misfortune of knowing what's really going on," said Bergeron, "which is no fun at all. And this has given rise to a whole new class of preening, narcissistic quacks like yourself who say in the service of rich and shameless polluters that the state of the atmosphere and the water and the topsoil on which all life depends is as debatable as how many angels can dance on the fuzz of a tennis ball."

He was angry.

---

The most important message of a crucifix, to me anyway, was how unspeakably cruel supposedly sane human beings can be when under orders from a superior authority.

---

[On Human Space Travel] "How could all that meat, needing so much food and water and oxygen, and with bowel movements so enormous, expect to survive a trip of any distance whatsoever through the limitless void of outer space? It was a miracle that such ravenous and cumbersome giants could make a roundtrip for a 6-pack to the nearest grocery store."

---

I agree with the great Socialist writer George Orwell, who felt that rich people were poor people with money.

---

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

---

[The 3 servants of the prison warden] were old, old men, sentenced to life in prison without hope of parole, back when I was a little boy in Midland City. I hadn't even learned to read and write, probably, when they ruined some lives, or were accused of doing so, and were forced to lead lives not worth living as a consequence.

That would certainly teach them a lesson.

---

My second point, in fact, was something the convicts had taught me. They all believed that the White people who insisted that it was their Constitutional right to keep military weapons in their homes all looked forward to the day when they could shoot Americans who didn't have what they had, who didn't look like their friends and relatives, in a sort of open-air shooting gallery we used to call in Vietnam a "Free Fire Zone." You could shoot anything that moved, for the good of the greater society, which was always someplace far away, like Paradise.

---

"At least we still have freedom of speech," I said.

And she said, "That isn't something somebody else gives you. That's something you have to give yourself."

---

---

Otter teaches human how to pet him.

---

Statistically, some of you will be single parents. Sorry, I have bad news for you: Love dies, and children live.

---

Celebrating a weird anniversary today - I just noticed about half of my music is date April 22, 2013 - ten years ago today (so like 2232 songs out of 4397 have the same date, though I know I ripped a big chunk of that from CDs in 2004 when I got my first iPod). I think that's most likely indicating when I switched to a mac as my main computer...

Its weird how liking to have files of music seems to make me old and stodgy. I just don't get the Spotify lifestyle, having to pay rent to get to your music... I just read Oliver Burkeman's "Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals" and enjoyed it a lot. Had a bit of that mid-quarantine melancholy stank.

Some of his point is that it's our very finitude that gives meaning to what we are - and our inability to have the infinities we think we want that causes so much misery.

He's kind of a recovered "time management specialist", and another theme is we can never really catch up with our todo lists, because as our accomplishments grow, so do our expectations of what we can do. Become a diligent worker, you'll likely get more work - and the same goes for our expectations of ourselves.

Like me he gets a lot of mileage out of sharing quotes and thoughts from other writers, so here are some pieces that stood out for me:

---

It's the very last thing, isn't it, we feel grateful for: having *happened*. You know, you needn't have happened. You needn't have happened. But you did happen.

---

What makes it unbearable is your mistaken belief that it can be cured.

---

You teach best what you most need to learn.

---

It's a self-help cliché that most of us need to get better at learning to say no. But as the writer Elizabeth Gilbert points out, it's all too easy to assume that this merely entails finding the courage to decline various tedious things you never wanted to do in the first place. In fact, she explains, "it's much harder than that. You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life."

---

The struggle for certainty is an intrinsically hopeless one--which means you have permission to stop engaging in it.

---

"Trying to control the future is like trying to take the master carpenter's place," cautions one of the founding texts of Taoism, the Tao Te Ching, in a warning echoed several centuries later by the Buddhist scholar Geshe Shawopa, who gruffly commanded his students, "Do not rule over imaginary kingdoms of endlessly proliferating possibilities." Jesus says much the same thing in the Sermon on the Mount (though many of his later followers would interpret the Christian idea of eternal life as a reason to fixate on the future, not to ignore it). "Take no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself," he advises. Then he adds the celebrated phrase "sufficient to the day is the evil thereof," a line I've only ever been able to hear in a tone of wry amusement directed at his listeners: Do you first-century working-class Galileans really lead such problem-free lives, he seems to be teasing them, that it makes sense to invent additional problems by fretting about what might happen tomorrow?

---

A plan is just a thought.

---

In his play The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard puts an intensified version of this sentiment [that a good childhood isn't just a way of getting a good adulthood] into the mouth of the nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Alexander Herzen, as he struggles to come to terms with the death of his son, who has drowned in a shipwreck--and whose life, Herzen insists, was no less valuable for never coming to fruition in adult accomplishments. "Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up," Herzen says. "But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what only lives for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment ... Life's bounty is in its flow. Later is too late."

---

Time is the substance I am made of. Time is a river which sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger which destroys me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire which consumes me, but I am the fire.

---

Finally something he doesn't quote but fits some of his themes:

I'll tell you a secret. Something they don't teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we're mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we're doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.

Still, I wonder if it's more of an attempt at sour grapes. Maybe we shouldn't want to live forever, but often it feels like it would be nicer to have more say in the timing of it all...

---

---