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“My advice to writers just starting out? Don't use semi-colons! They are transvestite hermaphrodites, representing exactly nothing. All they do is suggest you might have gone to college.”
― Armageddon in Retrospect
― Armageddon in Retrospect
“And, if you'll investigate the history of science, my dear boy, I think you'll find that most of the really big ideas have come from intelligent playfulness. All the sober, thin-lipped concentration is really just a matter of tidying up around the fringes of the big ideas.”
― Armageddon in Retrospect
― Armageddon in Retrospect
“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.”
― The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It
― The Innocents Abroad / Roughing It
“For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else. But we know too much to content ourselves with surviving, reproducing, dying—and nothing else. We know we are alive and know we will die. We also know we will suffer during our lives before suffering—slowly or quickly—as we draw near to death. This is the knowledge we “enjoy” as the most intelligent organisms to gush from the womb of nature. And being so, we feel shortchanged if there is nothing else for us than to survive, reproduce, and die. We want there to be more to it than that, or to think there is. This is the tragedy: Consciousness has forced us into the paradoxical position of striving to be unself-conscious of what we are—hunks of spoiling flesh on disintegrating bones.”
― The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
― The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
“This is the great lesson the depressive learns: Nothing in the world is inherently compelling. Whatever may be really “out there” cannot project itself as an affective experience. It is all a vacuous affair with only a chemical prestige. Nothing is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live. And to live on our emotions is to live arbitrarily, inaccurately—imparting meaning to what has none of its own. Yet what other way is there to live? Without the ever-clanking machinery of emotion, everything would come to a standstill. There would be nothing to do, nowhere to go, nothing to be, and no one to know. The alternatives are clear: to live falsely as pawns of affect, or to live factually as depressives, or as individuals who know what is known to the depressive. How advantageous that we are not coerced into choosing one or the other, neither choice being excellent. One look at human existence is proof enough that our species will not be released from the stranglehold of emotionalism that anchors it to hallucinations. That may be no way to live, but to opt for depression would be to opt out of existence as we consciously know it.”
― The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
― The Conspiracy Against the Human Race
Delhi Book Exchange.
— 14 members
— last activity Dec 28, 2012 08:34PM
A group of fellow readers who are interested in book exchange
r/Books
— 40 members
— last activity Jan 25, 2015 03:41AM
A Goodreads group of the subreddit r/Books!
r/books
— 849 members
— last activity Jan 13, 2018 01:39PM
Reddit meets Goodreads and has a love-child.
Himanshu’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Himanshu’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
111 books
|
304 friends
21 books
|
56 friends
2 books
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4 friends
5 books
|
73 friends
125 books
|
64 friends
0 books
|
122 friends
13 books
|
15 friends
0 books
|
95 friends
More friends…
Favorite Genres
Polls voted on by Himanshu
Lists liked by Himanshu
