Marie > Recent Status Updates

“Human beings adjust behavior on the metrics they’re held against. Anything you measure will impel a person to optimize his score on that metric. What you measure is what you’ll get. Period.” - Dan Ariely
Makes me think about what we as a society measure people on (money, confidence - whether earned or not, appearance…) and thus value.

“The day robots learn to compose books, I’ll give up writing for good.” Well, James…

“When the times are a crucible, when the air is full of crisis,” she said, “those who are the most themselves are the victims (…) Remember this: Nothing is written in the stars. Not these stars, nor any others. No one controls your destiny.” (pp. 238-239.)

“It does not matter whether I want to be changed, because I am changed. A new voice is pushing itself out of my writing, full of the closeness I feel to death, the awareness of my own mortality, so finely threaded, so acute. A new urgency. An impermanence in the air. I must write everything now, because who knows how long I have?”

“There is a sensation that is frightening, of a receding, of an ancestry slipping away”

“My mother is desperate for a firm date. ‘After the burial we can begin to heal,’ she says.”

“Grief was the celebration of love, those who could feel real grief were lucky to have loved.”

“His was a kind of naïveté, an innocence of the just.”

“Is that why I believe now in always trying? It is, of course, too easy to draw simple causative lines. It was the wholeness of him that formed me, but it was also these incidents, slice by slice.”

“So precious was my bond with my father that I cannot lay open my suffering until I have discerned its contours.”

“There is value in that Igbo way, that African way, of grappling with grief: the performative, expressive outward mourning, where you take every call and you tell and retell the story of what happened, where isolation is anathema and ‘stop crying’ a refrain.”

“A thing like this, dreaded for so long, finally arrives and among the avalanche of emotions there is a bitter and unbearable relief. It comes as a form of aggression, this relief, bringing with it strangely pugnacious thoughts. Enemies beware: the worst has happened. My father is gone. My madness will now bare itself.”

“I dare not think too deeply, or else I will be defeated, not merely by pain but by a drowning nihilism, a cycle of thinking there’s no point, what’s the point, there’s no point to anything. I want there to be a point, even if I do not know, for now, what that point is.”

Reading a Kij Johnson book is a bit like wading through knee-deep sour cherry syrup. It’s dark and viscous, slow at times and persistently melancholy, but if you reach down, dip your fingers in, and taste, it’s really quite good.

“The way to turn an ex-lover into a friend is to never stop loving them, to know that when one phase of a relationship ends it can transform into something else. It is to acknowledge that live is both a constant and a variable at the same time.”

“Rationality is subject to the single worst temptation—to raise what it knows now to the status of absolute.”

“The lesson I learned over and over again […] was the uselessness of information to most people, except as entertainment. If facts weren’t funny or scary, or couldn’t make you rich, the heck with them.”

“I see no harm in telling young people to prepare for failure rather than success, since failure is the main thing that is going to happen to them.”

When the nation was struggling to be born, were perhaps our most poignant […] an era where each man was forced to live with piercing intensity and perception. Two centuries later, when an American turns on the water and the lights in his apartment, he has little awareness of where these things come from; the greatest pity, however, is that he says, “Who cares where it comes from, as long as it keeps coming?”

The 2 prime movers in the Universe are Time and Luck.