Notable quotes, excerpts, and profound lines.

[gmw]

Whereas Leibniz claimed that this is the best of all possible worlds, Schopenhauer calmly asserted that it was the worst. He substantiated this statement by saying that ‘possible’ does not mean what somebody might be able to imagine, but what truly exists and what will endure. Thus, our world is constructed in such a way that it only barely remains afloat: if it were even slightly worse, it would no longer be able to sustain itself. And because a worse world would be unsustainable, it isn’t a possible world, ergo ours is the worst of all possible worlds.

-- Antti Tuomainen, The Rabbit Factor (2021)

[gmw]

“In the hospital,” Sharif says, as he lights a cigarette, “before she died, my mother used to say, ‘Hope is the pillar that holds up the world.’”

“Who said that?”

He shrugs. “Some days she said Aristotle, some days John Wayne. Maybe she made it up.”

Why did I leave?? Why this compulsion to be elsewhere?, to constantly seek something new? Was hope a curse, the last evil left in Pandora’s jar?

You fly all the way to the end of the stars, and all you want to do is go home …

-- Anthony Doerr, Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021)

[Dazrin]

The spells were gone, but the people in the tower did not know it, working on under the greater spell of hopelessness.

-- Ursula Le Guin, in "The Finder" from Tales from Earthsea

Less serious but also appreciated from the introduction are these truths:

things change:
authors and wizards are not always to be trusted:
nobody can explain a dragon.

[astrangerhere]

I finished Joan Didion's South and West the last few mornings over my coffee. Didion, a California native, took a trip through the American South in 1970. This was one of her observations:

“It occurred to me almost constantly in the South that had I lived there I would have been an eccentric and full of anger, and I wondered what form the anger would have taken. Would I have taken up causes, or would I have simply knifed somebody?”

As a native of the South, I can confirm - I am both full of anger and an eccentric.

[Greg Anos]

Originally Posted by astrangerhere

I finished Joan Didion's South and West the last few mornings over my coffee. Didion, a California native, took a trip through the American South in 1970. This was one of her observations:



As a native of the South, I can confirm - I am both full of anger and an eccentric.

What type of knife do you pack?

[astrangerhere]

Originally Posted by Greg Anos

What type of knife do you pack?

Now that'd be telling, and a southern woman never tells.

[Greg Anos]

“Those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
And those who do learn from history are doomed to watch helplessly while everybody else repeats it.”

[j.p.s]

"i do not traffic in colloquialisms" - Xenk Yendar

[astrangerhere]

“In truth, we will only perform any action a certain number of times, and to know that can never be helpful. There is, in my opinion, no use in demanding to know the number, in demanding to know upon waking the number of boxes to be ticked off every single day. After all, why would it help to be shown the mathematics of things, when instead we could simply imagine that whatever time we have is limitless.”

Julia Armfield, Our Wives Under the Sea

[Comfy.n]

"What I term the existential vacuum constitutes a challenge to psychiatry today. Ever more patients complain of a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness, which seems to me to derive from two facts. Unlike an animal, man is not told by instincts what he must do. And unlike man in former times, he is no longer told by traditions what he should do. Often he does not even know what he basically wishes to do. Instead, either he wishes to do what other people do (conformism), or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism)."

Viktor E. Frankl, The Will to Meaning

[Uncle Robin]

From Tina Fey's Bossypants For some reason(s), I thought of MR the instant I read this:

It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.

[shmn]

I'm currently in the middle of reading James by Percival Everett which is a wonderful retelling of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Jim (or, James) says:

Folks be funny lak dat. Dey takes the lies dey want and throws away the truths dat scares ’em.

Although that sentiment has been expressed many times through the ages, it's truth is manifest. Humans love their lies and delusions and rationalizations. I can't recall how often people refuse to hear the truth, even when it's self-evident, and would prefer to cling to their comforting lies. I've given up on that front...those comforting lies are just that...comforting and means of coping with a reality that is sometimes harsh and sometimes hurtful. Oh, well. So it goes.

Sorry for proselytizing.

[Angst]

In ancient times cats were worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.

― Terry Pratchett

[hildea]

"You speak wicked blasphemy," hissed Emer.
"Fluently," said Key.


From Long Live Evil by Sarah Rees Brennan

[SteveEisenberg]

One well-known neurosurgeon was once asked how he became so good at his craft. His answer? “there’s a graveyard full of my mistakes behind the hospital.”

— Gray Matters: A Biography of Brain Surgery

Who the well-known surgeon might be, my googling has not exposed. Book author Theodore Schwartz does admit to serious errors.