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Category: books
About reading…
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive. James Baldwin
Hell
Hell is the absence of the people you long for. Emily St. John Mandel, Station 11.
Fate, destiny, coincidence…
Like fate, destiny, except those aren’t real. Coincidence is as close as we get, but it’s all pareidolic: seeing patterns in things that aren’t there. Faces in clouds. We look for connections because we want to see them. We want everything attached as neatly as possible. It removes the concept – the concern – of…
The lighthouse…
In every story, there is always a lighthouse, leading one towards something. Of course, a lighthouse really only exists to tell you what to avoid. I still dream, James Smythe.
The hypothesis of God…
The hypothesis of God, for instance, gives an incomparably absolute opportunity to understand everything and know absolutely nothing. Give man an extremely simplified system of the world and explain every phenomenon away on the basis of that system. An approach like that doesn’t require any knowledge. Just a few memorized formulas plus so-called intuition and…
About science and knowledge.
Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time – when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are…
Station 11
What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost. — Emily St John Mandel, Station 11.
About science and spirituality
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So…
The best people…
The best people possess a feeling for beauty, the courage to take risks, the discipline to tell the truth, the capacity for sacrifice. Ironically, their virtues make them vulnerable; they are often wounded, sometimes destroyed. — Ernest Hemingway