Duncan Murray

“We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”
― David Graeber, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

“To be human is to confuse a satisfying story with a meaningful one, and to mistake life for something huge with two legs. No: life is mobilized on a vastly larger scale, and the world is failing precisely because no novel can make the contest for the world seem as compelling as the struggles between a few lost people.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory

“Of all the perplexing things about ‘being’, Heidegger goes on, the most perplexing of all is that people fail to be sufficiently perplexed about it. I say ‘the sky is blue’ or ‘I am happy’, as if the little word in the middle were of no interest. But when I stop to think about it, I realise that it brings up a fundamental and mysterious question. What can it mean to say that anything is? Most philosophers had neglected the question; one of the few to raise it was Gottfried von Leibniz, who in 1714 put it this way: why is there anything at all, rather than nothing? For Heidegger, this ‘why’ is not the sort of question that seeks an answer from physics or cosmology. No account of the Big Bang or divine Creation could satisfy it. The point of asking the question is mainly to boggle the mind. If you had to sum up Heidegger’s opening sally in Being and Time in one word, that word might be ‘wow!’ It was this that led the critic George Steiner to call Heidegger ‘the great master of astonishment’ — the person who ‘put a radiant obstacle in the path of the obvious’.”
― Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

“Civilized yards are all alike. Every wild yard is wild in its own way.”
― Richard Powers, The Overstory