He had always pitched in his conversational ante, and if he had contributed infrequently thereafter, it was because he was only interested when the stakes reached a certain minimum level. Small talk w...
Frank recalled a fire from his youth: two climber gals slightly buzzed had come bombing into Camp Four around midnight and hauled him away from a dying fire, insisting that he join them in a midnight...
Existential nausea comes from feeling trapped. It is an affect state resulting from the feeling that the future has only bad options. Of course every human faces the fact of individual death, and ther...
Everyone was equal there. Men, women, children, and people you couldn’t say what they were. All the various skin tones, and wherever you came from before, it didn’t matter. In this new place you made...
Every astronomer loves the stars.
Every age had its losses, they said, even youth, which lost first childhood, then youth too. And all first things were vivid, including losses. Just keep learning, the old woman said.
Enough is as good as a feast. And it’s when everyone is equal that your kids are safest.
Efficiency, n. The speed and frictionlessness with which money moves from the poor to the rich.
Chinese Buddhism was the natural study of reality, and led to feelings of devotion just from noting the daily leaves, the colors of the sky, the animals seen from the corner of the eye.
But we were talking about economics? John said. But this is economics, don’t you see, this is our eco-economics! Everyone should make their living, so to speak, based on a calculation of their real co...
But sometimes it seems to me that people just like to hold on to their grievances. Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.
But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies w...
Bad things don’t just grow on one path, they’re everywhere.
At this point justice and revenge are the same thing! Justice for people would be revenge on the oligarchs.
Art is not truth. Art is a lie that enables us to realize the truth. said Picasso
Anytime people do something consciously for the last time, Samuel Johnson is reported to have remarked, they feel sad.
And so sometimes when you feel strange, when a pang tugs at your heart or it seems like the moment has already happened- or when you look up in the sky and are surprised at the sight of bright Jupiter...
And analogies were mostly meaningless—a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy).
All the discussion in the meeting that day had centered on the impacts to humans. That would be the usual way of most such discussions; but whole biomes, whole ecologies would be altered, perhaps deva...
All that day he spent distracted, wandering as if still in a dream, wondering from time to time how one told the difference. Wasn’t this life dreamlike in every significant respect? Everything overlit...