Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, r. Jan. 2024

 Page 68 There is a time for any fledgling artist where one’s taste exceeds one’s abilities. The only way to get through this period is to make things anyway.

Page 73 Marx loved college theater. It wasn’t so much being on stage that he loved, but the productions themselves. He loved the intimacy of being in a tight group of people who had come together, miraculously, for a brief period in time, for the purpose of making art.

Page 75 When Sam had described the relationship between Marx and his father, he had said it was fraught, that Watanabe-san was demanding and sometimes even demeaning to Marx. Sadie saw no evidence of that. She found Marx’s father to be bright, interesting, and engaged. Other people’s parents are often a delight.

Page 87 As far as Sadie knew, Marx was a good-looking rich kid with a wide range of interests and very few skills. At Crossroads, where she’d gone to high school, half of her male classmates had been Marxes.

Page 103 Marx usually enjoyed the experience of making love to an ex, and this evening was no exception. It was interesting to note the way your body had changed and how their body had changed in the time since you’d last been intimate. There was a pleasant Weltschmerz that came over him. It was the nostalgia one experienced when visiting an old school and finding that the desks were so much smaller than in one’s memory.

Page 105 They were tired, but it was an honest tiredness, the kind that comes when you know you have put everything you have into a project.

Page 219 “So, what do I do?” she asked. “You go back to work. You take advantage of the quiet time that a failure allows you. You remind yourself that no one is paying any attention to you and it’s a perfect time for you to sit down in front of your computer and make another game. You try again. You fail better.”

Page 227 “I loved being a student actor. I was fully devoted to it, and now I’m not. I think if I’d become a professional, I would likely have fallen out of love with it anyway. It isn’t a sadness, but a joy, that we don’t do the same things for the length of our lives.” “Are you saying I get to quit making games?” “No,” Marx said. “You’re stuck. You’re doing this forever.”

Page 234 Sadie had often reflected that sex and video games had a great deal in common. There were certain objectives that needed to be met. There were certain rules that shouldn’t be broken. There was a correct combination of movements—button mashes, joystick pivots, keystrokes, commands—that made the whole thing work or not work. There was a pleasure to knowing you had played the game correctly and a release that came when you reached the next level. To be good at sex was to be good at the game of sex.

Page 261 “And is the point of everything we do to reach as broad an audience as possible? Is that the only reason to do anything? I’d like to know.” “It is, if we’re going to spend millions of dollars on it. Not to mention, the limited time of our very finite lives.”

Page 286 Memory, you realized long ago, is a game that a healthy-brained person can play all the time, and the game of memory is won or lost on one criterion: Do you leave the formation of memories to happenstance, or do you decide to remember?

Page 300 Video games don’t make people violent, but maybe they falsely give you the idea that you can be a hero.

Page 310 Once, when he was fifteen—just old enough to acknowledge the inner lives of others beyond himself;

Page 344 “I suppose we drink and we smoke for the same reasons it is done elsewhere. We must fill our infinite days with something.”

Page 378 How to explain to Destiny that the thing that made her work leap forward in 1996 was that she had been a dervish of selfishness, resentment, and insecurity? Sadie had willed herself to be great: art doesn’t typically get made by happy people.

Page 381 She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.

Page 382 Sadie knew that she herself had not become a person until recently. It was unreasonable to expect a child to emerge whole cloth. Naomi was a pencil sketch of a person who, at some point, would be a fully 3D character.

Page 392 “You know what I keep thinking? I keep thinking how easy it was to make that first Ichigo. We were like machines then—this, this, this, this. It’s so easy to make a hit when you’re young and you don’t know anything.”

Page 393 This generation doesn’t hide anything from anyone. My class talks a lot about their traumas. And how their traumas inform their games. They, honest to God, think their traumas are the most interesting thing about them.

Sun House by David James Duncan, r. Oct. 2023

p. 30 Risa never connected this tribe to her own amiability, diplomacy, strategic withdrawals, radiant energy, crazy grin, or anything of the sort. She believed she'd just lucked into an unusually cool circle of friends. But though many people spend energy in search of some sort of calm and stable center, a very few people simply are such centers. Without realizing it, Risa had become one of these rare ones, and as a result was encircled by friends in almost every milieu she frequented.

p. 114 Glancing from her poems to his journal, a pleasing thought occurred to Lorilee. She spoke it. "You know, you're a poet yourself, Trey. Your body's your pen. The mountains are your paper. Free-climbing vertical walls, you leave behind the lines your body traveled. And yeah, those lines are invisible once you come down off the wall. But I'll bet they've entered you. I'll bet those lines stay inside your mind and body the way a good mountain song or poem stays in my instruments and me. So who cares if others can't see what you wrote up there? It's in you."

p. 136 Trey looked lost. She tried to coax him. "The reason Snyder says 'The mountains are your mind' is that every mountain's true nature is alive and complete for all eternity, Trey. And so is our true nature. We have always been one with the mountains. But it's not climbing them that makes this so. It's being free of illusions. It's a disappearing of ego...

p. 189 ...which brings me to why I prefer high-mountain backpacking to skiing. In backpacking, the suffering endured as you climb sensitizes you to the gorgeousness when you arrive on high, and your elation lasts and lasts. In skiing, a mechanical lift crammed with party-hardies ratchets you to elevation in minutes, only to turn around and, in seconds, undo all the elevation gain you didn't suffer to achieve, so that way too soon you're DOWN and the only cure for elation deflation is to get back in the party-hardy line, pay the piper, ratchety-ratchet back up, and bouncy-bounce down again, up, down, up, down, wanka wanka wanka.

p. 229 "It also seems you are taught, you priests, to defend your God, but never to blame Him. This is a mistake. When we blame God, two things happen. On, He becomes present. He is now there with the sufferer, taking blame. And two, why not blame God? He's God. He can take all the blame there is! Go ahead! Blame Him! It keeps Him with you!"

p. 280 "Anna often talks of rising acidity in the oceans. But I wonder about our acidity? It's risen too. And how could it not? The rich own everything, including our token democracy, banks, and corporations, we're led by political half-truths and lobbyists, not leaders, and to try to understand our world we watch news-flavored propaganda delivered in meaningless soundbytes. But doesn't our acidity, like the oceans', cause delicate things to die out in us? I feel as if things as fine as coral reefs are vanishing from people. Things like a general kindness. Quiet sensitivity. Sincerity."

p. 308 Risa waited till she was calm enough not to hurl Julian's scathing tone back in his face. "What I experience," she said quietly, "is a feeling of arrogance if I pretend that spiritual giants like the Buddha and Jesus and Krishna don't know more about such matters than I do. Would you contradict Beethoven if he shared secrets about composing symphonies, or diss Martina Navratilova's secrets about crushing top-spin serves, because what they said was beyond your experience? It's common sense to believe it when Buddha, Krishna, and Jesus in the Apocrypha all tell us reincarnation is the way of it. That's not teatime chitchat. My concepts of mind and soul are based on truths that realized beings bequeath humanity to free us from illusion."

p. 340 "You didn't ask for my two cents but here they are: the only way you won't be disappointed with your life is by finding something great to do with it. That's the blessing and curse of being great yourself."

p. 394 On a high peak in the Alps, a climber named Emile Javelle once looked out over the world and was swallowed alive by a vastness that overwhelmed him. Years passed before he could even speak of it. When he did, he said that any philosophy, religion, or science that tells us what the universe is, or what our place and purpose here are, is a blindfold, not a seeing. 'The further the vision of our eye extends,' Javelle said, 'the greater the mystery becomes.'"

p. 456 It will be the task of our generation not to seek great things, but to save and preserve our souls out of the chaos, and to realize that it is the only thing we can carry as a prize from the burning building. –Dietrich Bonhoeffer

p. 469 Here in this body is a dwelling place. Within the dwelling place is a small space. What is there in this space that we should seek to perceive?

p. 495 In all but certain rare kinds of light – blue June dusk; golden day in October; midwinter moonlight amid fresh snowfall – the connecting thread won't even be visible.

p. 512 "I like retired traces like this," Lou said as he ratcheted along. "Keep cows an' vehicles off a track a few years, give it a mow now an' again, an' it takes on a gentleness. We'll reach that school feelin' better'n if we drove up. On foot a fella actually arrives."

p. 583 Unlike humans, fish are not ignorant of each other's intentions.

p. 707 The chronological presumption that we're "progressing into a better future" has not just blinded humans to the fullness of the moment, it's put the very survival of life on Earth in doubt.

p. 716 "'Silence is the tribute we pay to holiness,'" Kale whispered, "'We slip off words when we enter a sacred place just as we slip off shoes.'" [– Pico Iyer]

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.