Laura

Laura’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (256)
currently-reading‎ (0)
read‎ (324)
did-not-finish‎ (0)
nonfiction‎ (244)
fiction‎ (173)
animals‎ (141)
wish-list‎ (127)

scifi-fantasy‎ (118)
other-nonfiction‎ (50)
zoo‎ (44)
animal-ethics‎ (31)
circus‎ (30)
conservation‎ (25)
sea‎ (25)
rhythm-and-muse‎ (24)

space‎ (12)
museum‎ (10)
mythology‎ (10)
not-mine‎ (10)
recently-read‎ (6)
gslis-bookclub‎ (4)
on-loan-kc‎ (4)
secret-garden-bookclub‎ (4)

first-reads‎ (1)
on-loan-ao‎ (1)
on-loan-bkc‎ (0)
on-loan-cr‎ (0)
on-loan-cs‎ (0)

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Laura’s Quotes

“If you show someone something you've written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready’.”
― David Mitchell, Black Swan Green

tags: literary-criticism, writing

411 likes

“If language naturally evolves to serve the needs of tiny rodents with tiny rodent brains, then what's unique about language isn't the brilliant humans who invented it to communicate high-level abstract thoughts. What's unique about language is that the creatures who develop it are highly vulnerable to being eaten.”
― Temple Grandin

tags: animals, language

29 likes

“Animals are more than ever a test of our character, of mankind's capacity for empathy and for decent, honorable conduct and faithful stewardship. We are called to treat them with kindness, not because they have rights or power or some claim to equality, but in a sense because they don't; because they all stand unequal and powerless before us.”
― Matthew Scully, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy

tags: animals, ethics

132 likes

“Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.”
― C.S. Lewis

tags: adult, childhood, children, maturity

2287 likes

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps even something deeper like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works towards sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true.”
― Don DeLillo, White Noise

tags: fragile-creatures, hostile-facts, white-noise

178 likes

More of Laura’s quotes…