Jessica

“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

“Chip frowned and looked at Lilac. She was packing books into the carton, not looking at him. He looked back at King and sought words. ‘It would still be worth knowing,’ he said. ‘Being happy or unhappy – is that really the most important thing? Knowing the truth would be a different kind of happiness – a more satisfying kind, I think, even if it turned out to be a sad kind.”
― Ira Levin, This Perfect Day

“That’s what it’s like to lose a woman. And at a certain time, losing one woman means losing all women. That’s how we become Men Without Women. We lose Percy faith, Francis Lai, and 101 Strings. And ammonites and coelacanths. And we lose her beautiful back. But all of that has vanished. All that remains is an old broken piece of eraser, and the far-off sound of the sailor’s dirge. And the unicorn beside the fountain, his lonely horn aimed at the sky.
I hope that M is in heaven now – or somewhere like it. And it would be nice if her thoughts occasionally turn to me. But maybe that’s asking too much. I pray that, even if I’m not part of it, M is happy and at peace, with music playing on into eternity.
As one of the Men Without Women, I pray for this with all my heart. At this point prayer seems like the only thing I can do. Probably.
- Men Without Women”
― Haruki Murakami, Men Without Women

“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