Discover new books on Goodreads
Meet your next favorite book

Stephanie

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Stephanie.


Making New Worlds...
Rate this book
Clear rating

progress: 
 
  (page 87 of 190)
Nov 11, 2025 07:05PM

 
Loading...
James Baldwin
“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions that have been hidden by the answers.”
James Baldwin
tags: art

Richard Powers
“We found that trees could communicate, over the air and through their roots. Common sense hooted us down. We found that trees take care of each other. Collective science dismissed the idea. Outsiders discovered how seeds remember the seasons of their childhood and set buds accordingly. Outsiders discovered that trees sense the presence of other nearby life. That a tree learns to save water. That trees feed their young and synchronize their masts and bank resources and warn kin and send out signals to wasps to come and save them from attacks. “Here’s a little outsider information, and you can wait for it to be confirmed. A forest knows things. They wire themselves up underground. There are brains down there, ones our own brains aren’t shaped to see. Root plasticity, solving problems and making decisions. Fungal synapses. What else do you want to call it? Link enough trees together, and a forest grows aware.”
Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Not that long ago I wrote in a poem that 'life is so filled with meaning, there is no reason to try to reduce it'. That is how I feel and have felt like for years. Some sense of meaninglessness can come from an attack from others, at times subconscious, slowly but surely eroding one's self-respect and therefore sense of self, on all the meanings, infinite as they are, that are already right there. You can even be “raised” to do this self-destructive work yourself. The so called absurdity of life is a construction that creates a template for meaninglessness in itself. Humans revolting in this way against self-made systems. Perhaps to remove some responsibility of being human, because it is, wrongly, seen as a burden. What is truly a burden is to feel as if nothing in life is important. It is also the easiest thing to do. If you don't find meaning in for instance seeing a black squirrel running up the trunk of a tree, you probably won't find any meaning in travelling to the end of the world. It is a kind of explanatory greed this “search for meaning” that can literally destroy a world, and it is the equivalent of replacing the deepest of life’s mysteries with a nice looking garage. To numb before being looked at and experienced as a kind of totally lost "translation" is how the written language can be used at its worst. Meaning is already everywhere, expressing, unfolding itself, living and dying, changing and breathing. The noise distracting from that is what is meaningless but luckily, happily, that is just a construct.”
Rune Kjær Rasmussen

year in books
A.F.
885 books | 1,730 friends

elissa
2,821 books | 352 friends

Ilana (...
6,709 books | 207 friends

Kat
Kat
601 books | 17 friends

Dee Cha...
189 books | 678 friends

Sinéad
29 books | 133 friends

Debra Eve
630 books | 464 friends

Tom Brown
50 books | 725 friends

More friends…



Polls voted on by Stephanie

Lists liked by Stephanie