Julia

“There are no shortcuts. If you want to create the common sense that comes from twenty years of being in the world, you need to devote twenty years to the task... experience is algorithmically incompressible.”
― Ted Chiang, The Lifecycle of Software Objects

“In your world of classical art pieces are revered for the artist's skill of execution - that is, how deftly he places the brush to canvas or the chisel to stone. In modern art, however, masterpieces are often more about the idea than the execution.”
― Dan Brown, Origin

“You always think your pain is the most painful. You always think it's uniquely awful.”
― Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation

“Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.
Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling