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.

[Busybee09]

“At a bend in the Ganges, they paused to look at the land they were leaving” the famous epigraph from the Ramayana which gives the stellar title of Malgonkar Manohar's A bend in Ganges .
“I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;I lift my eyes and all is born again.”
― Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar