Elisa Gabbert > Quotes

“As the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio famously said, “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“Often, when something bad happens, I have a strange, instinctual desire for things to get even worse—I think of a terrible outcome and then wish for it. I recognize the pattern, but I don’t understand it. It’s as though my mind is running simulations and can’t help but prefer the most dramatic option—as though, in that eventuality, I could enjoy it from the outside.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“I don't want to feel good, I want to feel sad. Happiness lately feels mostly beside the point.

It's not that I think I deserve punishment. Just weird fleeting wishes for tragedy.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance

“My responsibility may be infinite, but my empathy is not, and there is more evil in the world at any given moment than I feel physically capable of processing, much less addressing with due thought and care.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“Anything you do every day—that's your life.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Any Person Is the Only Self

“These seem to be real questions we're wrestling with - where do I focus my anxiety so that I can feel like a good citizen in an anxious society? We believe we need to worry about the right problems, even if we can't solve them.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“I think delicate people are frightening. But I also think fear is erotic.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance

“In the era of fake news - a natural extension of the era of news proper - we don't just look to the media for facts, we look to it for narratives.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“I ignore the evils that support my quality of life, to which I've become accustomed. We've arranged to make the evils that benefit us invisible.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“Do our experiences belong to us? Are they a property, “like a hat”? (Wittgenstein says no.) Do you have to pay attention to your own desires, which you do not own, to be mindful? Can you not pay attention to your desires? Will attention excite or assuage my desire? (You can’t observe X without changing X.) I don’t care. I want to change my mind.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance

“...even the most reclusive of cave monks will have the desire to be known the world over as being the most reclusive cave monk remains one of the most comforting things I have ever read...wanting to be special isn't special.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Any Person Is the Only Self

“I want to go to sleep and wake up and not be a terrible person.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance

“Before we are born, we exist even less than after we die. We should tremble when we think of that time. How long until we exist so little again? The past happens fast. If there was infinite past, the sky would be nothing but starlight. “Observed darkness and nonuniformity of night” make us finite. There are few stars, moving farther apart. The past is bright, but black and white. The future is dim but in color. The past is still. The future trembles.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance

“Reality is different. We have to discover what is out there—what is real and what is merely a product of our imagination.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“I have a friend whose therapist tells him, 'you know too much to be happy', meaning it's too hard to live when you believe you can see how the rest of your life will play out. That may be what I miss most about youth; unknowing without fear.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Any Person Is the Only Self

“...Hope is the dark part of morning
The trees and not the sky behind
A glimmer without a color...”
― Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance

“Death by attrition. War of natural causes.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance

“All my imagined futures have turned into memories. Today, there’s more past than yesterday. But is there any less future?”
― Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance

“The nuances of the terminology reflect degrees of stigma, but they influence stigma too - the names we give to people's discomfort affect how uncomfortable those people make us.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: Notes on Life in the Pre-Apocalypse

“The value of a life, its worthiness of our moral regard, is determined by social relations.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“Ecological disasters create the conditions of war, while giving us no one to bargain with - no one to fight or beg mercy from. Science improves our predictive power, but those predictions are often just a preview of the coming brute reality. While they may go some way toward preparing us psychologically, they can't in themselves protect us.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: Notes on Life in the Pre-Apocalypse

“Photos extend our existence, since they can live on after our deaths like poems or mummy masks.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Word Pretty

“Sometimes I think evil is merely cumulative, an effect of scale, a swarm intelligence. If it was just two boys who found each other in the woods, wouldn't they band together, become friends? Or would they become a group in search of an enemy?”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“Part of the job, I think, of the aphorist is to write statements that even she does not necessarily agree with.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Word Pretty

“I like listening to sad music when I’m sad. It doesn’t make me feel happier per se, it just improves the quality of the sadness.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance

“Societal mores are in place not to maintain the natural order but to enforce unnatural order.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“I sometimes think Point Break is my favorite movie. It depends what one means by “favorite.” Is it the same as your desert island movie? Do I think it’s the best movie? It depends what you mean when you say something’s good. There’s a sense in which it’s not a good movie at all—I mean, of course, the 1991 Point Break, starring Patrick Swayze and Keanu Reeves, which is in some ways a ridiculous, even stupid movie—yet I am basically always up for watching it, and right when it’s over, I always sort of want to watch it again.”
― Elisa Gabbert, Any Person Is the Only Self

“I feel this way all the time now.Nothing is safe. Everything's fine.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“It's the spectacle, I think, that makes a disaster a disaster. A disaster is not defined simply by damage or death count; deaths by smoking or car wrecks are not a disaster because they are meted out, predictable. A disaster must not only blindside us, but be witnessed, and rewitnessed, in public.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays

“Especially now, when we're likely past the point of avoiding a climate calamity of our own creation, disasters can feel like karmic punishment. But the earth is not a vengeful god - just an indifferent one.”
― Elisa Gabbert, The Unreality of Memory: And Other Essays