Caleb

“Writers fish for the right words like fishermen fish for, um, whatever those aquatic creatures with fins and gills are called. 
”
― Jarod Kintz, This is the best book I've ever written, and it still sucks

“Jamie leaned over. “And your perfect world?”

“Mmm,” Helen smiled. “Perfect is complicated. Hard to explain.”

“Give it a shot,” I prodded her.

“It’s… beautiful is the best word to describe it,” she said.

Jamie and I nodded.

“Everything that isn’t necessary to getting what we want is gone,” she said, eyes closing, as if she was vividly imagining. “There’s an abundance of it all, thanks to science. Food is everywhere and it overflows and there’s nothing to worry about because we have and we want and we take. We’re, and by we I mean people, we’re everywhere and we spill over into one another and we’re all knit together, physically and mentally. It’s an exquisite landscape of things that don’t ever run out to see and touches and tastes and smells and mating and eating and mindless fighting and eating-mating and fighting-eating and fighting-”

“Okay,” I said, interrupting. I paused, then when I couldn’t think of what to say. “Okay.”

Helen reached down to her plate, used a fingertip to wipe up a bit of frosting, and popped it into her mouth, sucking it off.

“Okay,” I said, still at a bit of a loss for words.

“That’s a mental image that’s going to be with me forever,” Jamie said, dropping his head down until his face was in his hands.

“I don’t see where ethics come into that world,” I said, more to see Jamie’s reaction than out of curiosity.

“No,” Jamie said. “Don’t-”

“The closer you get to perfection, the further you get from ethics,” Helen said, as if it was common sense.”
― Wildbow, Twig

“Parents who discipline their child by discussing the consequences of their actions produce children who have better moral development , compared to children whose parents use authoritarian methods and punishment.”
― Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty

“She’s confident in her abilities. But that’s not where I hit her. It’s called dissonance. You believe one thing deeply enough that it’s central to your identity. Then something, me, steps in to challenge that belief. It’s a hell of a leap of faith to go from believing something and understanding how much of the world works, to saying ‘I don’t know’. Some deny, and you can get stupid-as-hell behaviors from those who see something plain as day but deny it because it conflicts with something they believe. Some get angry, some distract themselves until they can figure out how to deal with it… but very few will turn around and throw themselves headlong into more questions. More dissonance.”
― wildbow, Twig