Bruce Holsinger > Quotes

“Insidious, these false versions of superiority and ease we project onto other families: how often they blind us to the surer comforts of our own.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“You must convince your readers that your characters are flesh and blood rather than words on dead skin, that their loves and hatreds and passions are as deep and present as the readers' own. Your task is to delight, to pleasure, to lift your reader to another sphere of being and then strand him there, floating above the earth and panting for more lines.”
― Bruce Holsinger, A Burnable Book

“You’ll be a lot less obsessed with what people think of you when you understand how infrequently they do.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“A blessing, to know the talents and limitations of those closest to you, what they’re capable of and what they aren’t. One kind of friend who will spend hours sifting through your psyche; another who will sacrifice half a day to scrubbing your toilets.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“Friends are the siblings God never gave us.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“And this, I propose, is the inhuman soul of the algorithm. It may think for us, it may work for us, it may organize our lives for us. But the algorithm will never bleed for us. The algorithm will never suffer for us. The algorithm will never mourn for us. In this refusal lies the essence of its moral being.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“I know Charlie is right, I know I need to let those fantasies go. But I can’t help my reaction, will never escape the churn of dreams, mistakes, regrets, and terrors that is fatherhood. No matter what parents do, their children’s outcomes are neither predictable nor inevitable. Life is not an algorithm, and never will be.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Artificial Intelligence confronts us with the problem of distributed culpability. Human morality, historically, centers around agency and intentionality. We blame the drunk driver, not the car; we credit the artist, not the brush. AI systems muddy these waters. AIs are not mere tools; their learning algorithms endow them with agency. They make “decisions” based on data, albeit without consciousness or intent. A strict division between human and machine culpability is quickly becoming untenable, creating a landscape where ethical norms strain under unfamiliar weights. In”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“It’s a real shame. It’s just not about the kids anymore.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“When humans do something wrong, they generally face consequences. Even when our wrongdoing goes undetected by another—a parent, a spouse, an institution, law enforcement—we tend to experience guilt, shame, or regret. Only a psychopath lives life free of remorse.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Parents always want to manage the narrative instead of letting kids write their own.” She clapped a hand over her mouth.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“I am the stolid husband who buys two beds and two sets of sheets so his wife can get enough sleep, who trains his children to line up their shoes and put the dishes in the cabinets a certain way so their mother won’t have to rearrange things after them, who orders the messy world below so her great mind can soar like an eagle above the fray.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Man is ever blind to his own faults, but fox-quick at perceiving those of others.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Invention of Fire

“Because success in life didn’t just happen. Things didn’t always work out, no matter where or how you were raised.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“Love can be sustaining even in the worst of circumstances. Bare life, though, can be passing hard to endure”
― Bruce Holsinger, A Burnable Book

“Whether to kill an old man or risk harming an infant. Whether to spare the pregnant mother obeying the traffic rules or the teenage pedestrian jaywalking at the same crossing.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“I understand where Darla was coming from, the notion that every four thousand dollars saves a life, that every dollar you spend on your wants is a dollar you don’t spend on someone else’s needs. But I believe money is more complicated than that, the way money works in the world. I’m no longer motivated by that crushing sense of guilt and obligation. A philosopher I know once told me about Peter Singer’s drowning child scenario, where you’re as responsible for the child drowning in front of you as you are for a random kid starving to death in Bangladesh. Anyone would save the kid from drowning and ruin a thousand-dollar suit, right, but how many would give that same thousand dollars to a charity that keeps a starving child across the world alive for a year? Extend that logic out and it becomes impossible to justify any purchase, any expense that isn’t directed at and for another.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“I decide not to push.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“They can be so bitchy and sneaky and competitive sometimes, like about who’s going to more parties or whose kid is busier or whatnot, especially my mom. But even when they’re stabbing each other in the back, they know how to help you through things, you know?”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“It can be terrifying, how precise and exacting she gets in this analytic mode, when I become the exposed object of her focus, as if a razor knife has snicked through me, leaving my body and brain slashed by a thousand cuts.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Another when the system will confront a split-second choice between striking a child on a bike and colliding with a bus full of senior citizens. And another”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“No matter what parents do, their children’s outcomes are neither”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Look at me. I’m the worst of all. This is the worst person I have ever been.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“We live in an immense world, whole universes of taste and touch and scent, of voices commingling in the light, and dying away with the common dread that stands at every man’s door. Yet we perceive and remember this world only as it creates those single fragments of experience: moments of everyday kindness, or self-sacrificing love, or unthinkable brutality. I”
― Bruce Holsinger, A Burnable Book

“The whole episode taught me a maxim known by any third-rate family therapist: A secret can be more wounding than a lie.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“With his charisma, power, intellect, and depthless wealth, he is a radiant sun pulling at these people with a gravitational force that keeps them all, including Lorelei, in his orbit.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Some people would have said this was because Z’s mother was bossy. She’d heard people say that before, people like Beck and Charlie and even Rose. But being bossy was really just about having sound leadership skills.”
― Bruce Holsinger, The Gifted School

“Empathetic dysfunction, her therapists call it, a sometimes debilitating response to an overload of impersonal but negative information. Lorelei has a way of assuming the pain of distant others and wearing it as a mantle, like the old quilt covering her now.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“By now Morrissey has circled the lot. Her sedan slows at the stop sign fronting the main road. One of her taillights is cracked, a detail that gives me an unkind flicker of amusement. She lifts her phone and scowls at the screen as she types: driving directions, a takeout food order on an app, maybe a text. The phone remains in her raised hand as she pulls out onto the boulevard, where she guns the engine and shoots away, an angry bullet in the sun.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability

“Like an algorithm, a family is endlessly complex yet adaptable and resilient, parents and children working together as parts of an intricate, coordinated whole. Sure, there might be some bugs in the system, a glitch or two. But if you simply tweaked the constants from time to time, life would continue to unfold in its intricate yet predictable patterns, an endless cycle of inputs and outputs subject to your knowledge and control.”
― Bruce Holsinger, Culpability