Jessica

“Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives--or to find strength in a very long one.”
― V.E. Schwab, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue

“In my experience, insecure people constantly need to show that they are superior to others, whether they are or not, and they will often stoop to unscrupulous tactics to achieve this, the most common being to persistently mock, criticize, and put others down, the objective being to lower the status of the other person in the eyes of others, thus easing their own feelings of insecurity, and inadequacy. Secure people, on the other hand, do not have this need.”
― Robert Black, Laowai

“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. But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film. ·”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“A joke sounds like a joke.
An insult sounds like an insult.
Most people, nowadays, trying to be funny, smuggle insult into jokes.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes