Joshua V. Scher > Quotes

“Truth isn’t solid. It’s liquid. It takes on the shape of whatever container it’s poured into.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“No matter what the whiny poets say, love isn’t as all encompassing, eternal, and fervent as the Romantics have led us to believe. It can be compartmentalized, momentary, and considered. I can fall in love twelve times walking down the block. Once with a smile, another time with the sway of a ponytail as it bounces left to right with every step, and again with the way a girl places a hand on her boyfriend’s shoulder absentmindedly. But when we express love, when we voice a term that we all define together, we get lost. You say one thing, she hears another. Each of us tells himself a story about what this other person means. But words aren’t fixed. Words are merely containers that we pour meaning into and try to give it shape. If people could just accept that, they’d be a whole lot happier.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“you’re never lonely when you’re in pain.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“Somewhere along the way, life kicks the fulcrum out from under us. We fall, we hurt, and then we push the seesaw down to where the fulcrum waits, and rebalance, until the next kick. It’s the journey of living. Whether it’s a changing environment, an emotional loss, a damning diagnosis—we accept, we endure, we normalize.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“The philosophy of science is about as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“To the scientist there is the joy in pursuing truth which nearly counteracts the depressing revelations of truth. ~H. P. Lovecraft”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“Inevitably, pressure increases on intimate relationships as they take on all-encompassing importance in a contracting world. The stress has a polarizing effect of either cannibalizing the relationship or canonizing it. It becomes the scapegoat or panacea for all the escalating and destabilizing frustration of exile.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“There’s a trick to falling. Surrender. You simply give in to the inevitable. More often than not, a greater injury is suffered from trying to prevent the fall. You can’t fight failure any more than you can resist the gravity of the future. It pulls at you whether you resist or not.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“It could not last. Eventually the petals fell from the bloom. They are not who they once were.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“Behavior isn’t driven by permanent traits that apply across the board. Rather, someone could be honest at work, but deceptive with his spouse. People don’t have character, but rather a multiplicity of tendencies activated by context.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“There comes a point when too much is nothing at all. Infinity and zero, twin extremes.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“A Zen master once told me to do the opposite of whatever he told me. So I didn’t.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“You just tell him sometimes you got to try something even if it’s wrong. ‘Cause a mistake will still tell us a hell of a lot more than his foot-dragging.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“I wish I could run away from me.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“So often we think of pain as the enemy when really it’s our caretaker.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“According to Isaac Asimov, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny . . .”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“Toby found himself sharing a stool with a tipsy redheaded actress who wore Ugg boots, a scarf, and eye shadow with glitter (aka the herpes of makeup).”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“wrote”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“Or is it not even the truth? Another fiction perhaps, a riddle deciphered by the algebra of lying.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“After the first glass of absinthe you see things as you wish they were. After the second you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world,”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“I have the distinct feeling that my bedroom ceiling fan is spreading rumors about me.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“In the beginning is the deed. ~Goethe”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“Life has taught us that love does not consist of gazing at each other, but in looking together in the same direction. ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“The more one does and sees and feels, the more one is able to do, and the more genuine may be one’s appreciation of fundamental things like home, and love, and understanding companionship. ~Amelia Earhart”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world. ~Arthur Schopenhauer”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“experiments are never failures when they fail to achieve predicted results. They’re failures when they fail to test the hypothesis in question, when the data they produce don’t prove anything one way or another.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“* Things are not always what they seem. Things are not always what they are.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“The average human body, which is 99 percent hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon is made up of over seven thousand trillion atoms.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There

“You can’t fight failure any more than you can resist the gravity of the future.”
― Joshua V. Scher, Here & There