Stephen Henderson

“I was struck by the graphic quality, the fullness of her descriptions. Her parents spoke too of this fullness: “All the characters or creatures or objects Charlotte talks about are placed,” her mother said; “spatial reference is essential to ASL. When Charlotte signs, the whole scene is set up; you can see where everyone or everything is; it is all visualized with a detail that would be rare for the hearing.” This placing of objects and people in specific locations, this use of elaborate, spatial reference had been striking in Charlotte, her parents said, since the age of four and a half—already at that age she had gone beyond them, shown a sort of “staging” power, an “architectural” power that they had seen in other deaf people—but rarely in the hearing.”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“This innate structure, this latent structure, is not fully developed at birth, nor is it too obvious at the age of eighteen months. But then, suddenly, and in the most dramatic way, the developing child becomes open to language, becomes able to construct a grammar from the utterances of his parents. He shows a spectacular ability, a genius for language, between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-six months”
― Oliver Sacks, Seeing Voices

“Records made ‘at one sitting’ sound so fresh now – because the rate of discovery and the emotional tempo match those of the listener. What’s infuriating, though, is how fragile those fabrics are. I’ve noticed that, trying to work on improvisations that have ‘something’, they very quickly dissolve into nothing the more attention they get. It’s almost like trying to reconstruct a very funny dinner party – you had to be there, and it’s impossible to isolate the chemistry of what really made it work.”
― Brian Eno, A Year with Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno's Diary

“Nuclear weapons were a discontinuous change in human power. At Hiroshima, a single bomb did the damage of thousands. And six years later, a single thermonuclear bomb held more energy than every explosive used in the entire course of the Second World War.43”
― Toby Ord, The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity