Matthew Bizer > Recent Status Updates

“In another part of Chicago stood the Institute for Nuclear Research, in which men may have had theories upon the essential worth of human nature but were half ashamed of them, since no quantitative instrument had yet been designed to measure it.“

“…there had been a seismic shift in the public consciousness, as though people wanted to turn down the noise, especially the incredible violence […] As if Boston had become some American version of Northern Ireland, a city that no longer seemed safe, a city that had come apart, Humpty Dumpty lying on the ground in pieces, waiting for all the king's horses and all the king's men to put it back together again.”

“…even if we're looking at a planet that's two degrees warmer, that's not a planet that I particularly wanna live on, but it may be the planet we get. It strikes me as not very useful to throw up our hands like, well, we’re all gonna die, and therefore we don't have to think about how we live better lives on a worse planet.” - Dr. Kate Marvel

“One of the great ironies of the decision to pair South Boston and Roxbury in the first phase of busing was that it took two of the poorest neighborhoods of the city, two neighborhoods that had a high percentage of welfare families and single mothers, and used them as the test case; two neighborhoods that, race aside, had more in common with each other than they did with any of the suburbs that ringed Boston.”

“To Williams, hitting was science, something to be analyzed like some lab specimen under a microscope. To Yastrzemski, it was instinctive, something he had done all his life.”

“Yet there was an acknowledgment that these were two great teams that would be playing the next day, two teams that had survived tumultuous seasons, two teams that had come to understand that baseball could be like a lover you never really can know, a game that always surprises you just when you thought you had it figured out.”

“We need to raise a strong, solid generation of survivors. Right now we're soft. You, me, the whole Western world. We're the result of growing up in unprecedented comfort and stability. It's the kids of today that'll have to make the world of tomorrow work. And they're going to inherit a mess.”

“One thing l learned back in my graduate school days: When you're stupid tired, accept that you're stupid tired. Don't try to solve things right then.”

Man, this book can be fucking devastating when it chooses to be. Andy Weir’s prose really grew a lot between The Martian and this.

“‘Listen to me, motherfucker, listen.’ Getting right up in my face. ‘Mine ain't about yours. And yours ain't about mine. We all suffer the same. You don't get to decide what hurts you. You just hurt. Let me say my shit, and you say your shit, and I'll be there for you. Okay?’

[…] It's always going to be important to acknowledge someone else's pain, but denying your own pain doesn't do that.”

"And just like that another climate denier is born. See how easy it is? All I have to do is tell you something you don't want to hear."

“Life is short and you should wake up in the morning feeling excited about what you do. And if you don't and you can afford to stop, you should stop. Even if it makes some people angry.”

“Wherever there is human nature, there is drama. But— it is not always just where you think it is. Remember that.”

Oh. Ohhh. Ohhhhhhhh. My. God.

"To be quite frank with you all I am quite calm and un-nervous. After a while you get used to the idea of being watched and hated. Also I just don't have the goddamned time to be nervous or worried.... I am in the midst of a revolution. This is the greatest revolution since the American Revolution."

“Nobody reaches the end of their life and regrets even a single moment of creating something, no matter how shitty or unappreciated that something might have been.”

I don’t think I’ve devoured 100 pages so fast since I was a teenager

“By the third week of July, the tender wounds of violence were hardening into a callused defiance. The defiance showed in how volunteers joked about their lives.”

Starting to scare myself with how much I relate to Jeff Tweedy

“I think that may be the highest purpose of any work of art, to inspire someone else to save themselves through art.“

“At the very least, I wish everyone had a way to kill time without hurting anyone, including themselves.“

“Everybody wants meaning in their life, and we all find it in different ways. For me it was buying records.”

“I was never an outright enemy of any clique, nor was I ever fully absorbed and identified as a part of any distinct group. I was a misfit, but I was aware I had it better than the true outcasts. That didn't stop me from feeling alienated and irrationally repulsed by most of my classmates.”