The Fool's Progress by Edward Abbey, r. Jun. 2023

 p. 7 No one has a right to complain about life because no one is compelled to endure it.

p. 31 She bought the uniform: the Nike shoes, the flimsy erotic Adidas track shorts, the heavy-duty reinforced breast sling, the long-billed sunshade, the AM/FM Walkman radio headset, and commenced to laboring up and down the streets with Eric Clapton and James Taylor bawling in her ears, the jogger's look of smug pain and spiritual fortitude on her face. Favoring her sore foot, she gulped the dust and grime and noxious gases of the passing motor traffic.

p. 103 Onward, through the scrubby woods and past a solitary winter-shaggy horse in a huge and lonely field. The field looks lonely, not the horse. Why is that?

p. 150 Nobody paid [his dad] any attention and he knew it and the knowledge made him angry and lonely and sick in his heart. Joe Lightcap was not a philosopher; he took ideas seriously.

p. 181 There's two ways to be rich: (1) sweat and scheme and grovel for money and never get it anyhow; or (2) live the simple life. Sit down.

p. 258 What is the perfect robot anyhow but a properly processed human being? a soundly pussywhipped American male?

p. 301 Very deep is the well of the past. Shall we not call it – bottomless? What is our history but a vivid and continuous dream? We skim over the roadway bearing northeast to Kansas, me and my mortal dog, and the infinite dimensions of the recent past – a mere one century – make the brain giddy, the mind reel, the heart to swoon.

p. 329 Yes, it was a good sweet job. Old Gibbsie was a good superintendent. The United States government was a government. Henry Lightcap had found his niche, his slot, his cranny, his refuge in the vast vermiculate edifice of the American socioeconomy. And he kept it too, off and on, for the next fifteen years, working five, six months a year in various national parks and national forests, through national chaos and international calamity. Brother Will might disapprove, thinking such work unworthy of a full-grown man, little better than welfare, but for Henry Lightcap – a "fool-grown man," as he liked to explain, such a part-time occupation made the ideal vocation. Henry Lightcap needed those half years free. Why? For what? For the sake of freedom itself, he told his inner critic. Liberty like virtue is its own reward, the only reward it's likely to get. And for the sake of simplicity – la vie philosophique.

p. 334 To be sexually attractive is to be perpetually on guard. A pretty girl lives in a state of constant siege. And how we loved it-the tension, the conflict, the promise of delight.

p. 435 ... and what did all that laborious reading gain him? Couldn't say. He remembered best not the development of character or the unraveling of plot or the structure of an argument – philosophy is an art form, not a science – but simply the quality of the author's mind. That part remained and by that standard alone he finally judged his author and either threw the book aside or read it through and searched out more by the same writer. And that drive also, the mania to know and understand, it too waned somewhat with the passing of years, until he found himself again alone...

p. 481 Again Henry gazed out the window. A swirl of little pale birds, like confetti, like a net of lace, exfoliated from the sky and draped themselves upon an Aleppo pine. Water sprinklers jetted in explosive circles, drenching the hospital lawns. Just plain folks walked about. The world continued, bland and blasé, while catastrophe opened beneath the one who cared.

The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher, r. May 2023

 

Exhalation by Ted Chiang, r. May 2023

 p. 127 Some members of the user group quit when Data Earth closed; others took a wait-and-see approach but grew discouraged after they saw how impoverished the private Data Earth was, choosing to suspend their digients rather than raise them in a ghost town. And more than anything else, that's what the private Data Earth resembles: a ghost town the size of a planet. There are vast expanses of minutely detailed terrain to wander around in, but no one to talk to except for the tutors who come in to give lessons. There are dungeons without quests, malls without businesses, stadiums without sporting events; it's the digital equivalent of a postapocalyptic landscape.

p. 208 Part of me wanted to stop this, to protect children's ability to see the beginning of their lives filtered through gauze, to keep those origin stories from being replaced by cold, desaturated video. But maybe they will feel just as warmly about their lossless digital memories as I do about my imperfect, organic memories. 

    People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we've lived; they're the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we've experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn.

p. 227 Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

    Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

    But that era is coming to an end. Remem is merely the first of a new generation of memory prostheses, and as these products gain widespread adoption, we will be replacing our malleable organic memories with perfect digital archives. We will have a record of what we actually did instead of stories that evolve over repeated tellings. Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint Exupéry, r. Jan. 2023

p. 14 And the little prince broke into a lovely peal of laughter, which irritated me very much. I like my misfortunes to be taken seriously.

p. 67 "One only understands the things that one tames," said the fox. "Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more."

p. 71 "It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important."

The Urge by Carl Erik Fisher, r. Oct. 2022

 p. 230 Reading Nyswander today is still inspiring. Her fierce optimism and respect for the dignity of her patients shine off the page – including recognition of the diversity of psychological and social factors that influence drug use. Casting aside psychoanalytic stereotypes that would reduce all addicts to "masochists" or people seeking a "crude substitute for masturbation," she instead speaks evocatively about the depth and variety of her patients' motivation for using drugs, describing how drug use can serve perfectly understandable functions: "a way of keeping alive whatever life and joy they can feel," or even "a way into a mystical experience," "a clarity of felling and oneness of perception."

p. 266 A fundamental shift in our thinking would be the best way to help people like Josie – letting go of the ideal of a "drug-free" world and instead prioritizing policies and treatments that accept the fact that drug use and addiction are facts of life, unlikely to leave us anytime soon.

p. 281 It is not that addiction is or is not a brain disease, or a social malady, or a universal response to suffering – it's all of these things and none of them at the same time, because each level has something to add but cannot possibly tell the whole story.... [Mental] disorders, in other words, are not ground truths about reality, like chemical elements on the periodic table. Jellinek's word was a good one: they are more like "species" with a general family resemblance – biological species in nature have fuzzy boundaries, and the members of those species are not all the same. We must still make psychiatric diagnoses in order to do research, advocate for insurance payments, or otherwise translate our diagnostic thinking into the real world, but these labels should not be confused with an enduring, unitary, and discrete essence.

The Shipping News by Annie Proulx, r. Sep. 2022

 p. 8 Irregular hours encouraged him to imagine that he was master of his own time. Home after midnight from a debate on the wording of a minor municipal bylaw on bottle recycling, he felt he was a pin in the hinge of power.

p. 31 But the idea of the north was taking him. He needed something to brace against.

p. 241 Quoyle was not going back to New York, either. If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here [in Newfoundland] it was as though he had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it. Thought of his stupid self in Mockingburg, taking whatever came at him. No wonder love had shot im through the heart and lungs, caused internal bleeding.

p. 244 "If you make it to March, boy, you'll make it to heaven. You get on the plane in Misky Bay, there's so much ice on the wings and the wind from hell you doubt the plane can make it, but it does, and when it glides down and lands (in Florida), when they throws open the door, my son, I want to tell you the smell of hot summer and suntan oil and exhaust fumes make you cry with pleasure. A sweet place they got down there with the oranges."

p. 293 "We got no control over any of the fishery now. We don't make the decisions, just does what we're told where and when we're told. We lives by rules made somewhere else by sons a bitches don't know nothin' about this place." A hard exhalation rather than a sigh. But, Quoyle thought, that's how it was everywhere. Jack was lucky he'd escaped so long.

p. 332 Billy Pretty speaking, a glass in his hand. His face gone blood-red with whiskey and the words tumbling out in ecstatic declamation, tossing in the lop of his own talk. "You all know we are only passing by. We only walk over these stones a few times, our boats float a little while and then they have to sink. The water is a dark flower and a fisherman is a bee in the heart of her."

Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, r. Aug. 2022

 p. 186 "When you write something, you focus your full attention on it. It's almost impossible to write one thing while thinking about another. The act of putting it on paper keeps your thoughts and intentions aligned."

p. 203 I think of all the evenings we've sat on this porch. Drinking. Laughing. Bullshitting with the neighbors passing by as the streetlamps up and down the block winked on.

p. 314 "I've seen so many versions of you. With me. Without me. Artist. Teacher. Graphic designer. But it's all, in the end, just life. We see it macro, like one big story, but when you're in it, it's all just day-to-day, right? And isn't that what you have to make your peace with?"