Tonya Sh

“The idea of determinism, he said, is that everything that happens, and every decision or action you make, is "causally inevitable." Why? Because everything is caused by something else: a preceding action, event or situation. [...] He said people can only act as they actually do. A murderer, for example, will inevitably murder because his childhood, his genes, his brain chemistry, his socioeconomic situation, his fear of rejection, the convenient proximity of a defenseless woman on a dark street corner, will all lead him, inevitably, to murder.
Someone said, quite passionately as I recall, as if we were speaking of a specific murder and not a hypothetical one, "But he chose to murder! He had free will!"
The bearded man said he himself was a "hard determinist" and therefore did not believe in free will. [...]
If free will doesn't exist, if all your decisions and actions are inevitable, are you still required to apologize for them?”
― Liane Moriarty, Here One Moment

“So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

“I think I would rather be a man than a god. We don’t need anyone to believe in us. We just keep going anyhow. It’s what we do.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“in moments of high emotion—whether they’re triggered by anger or envy, humiliation or resentment—if the next thing you’re going to say makes you feel better, then it’s probably the wrong thing to say.”
― Amor Towles, Rules of Civility