Quotes and highlights

In order to achieve our mission, we will conduct our business with the following Code of Ethics in mind:

1. Obey the law.
2. Take care of our members.
3. Take care of our employees.
4. Respect our suppliers.

If we do these four things throughout our organization, then we will achieve our ultimate goal, which is to reward our shareholders.

Making [video] games combines everything that’s hard about building a bridge with everything that’s hard about composing an opera. Games are operas made out of bridges.

Sir, I am a true labourer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness, glad of other men’s good, content with my harm, and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck.

Nobody going on a business trip would have been missed if he never arrived.

To be embarrassingly candid, we didn't think through our initial strategy very well. We were caught completely by surprise. They were takeover professionals. We spend our time figuring out how to sell more handbags.

When I get emails asking for life advice, which I do every day now, I cannot give any beyond: Own something, make lots of decisions that have outcomes, try to be right 51 percent of the time, do that often, and repeat.

“Can you give us the three secrets of happiness?”

I said: “First, there’s no secret. Second, there’s not just three points. Third, it takes a whole life, but it is the most worthy thing you can do."

Behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

I find myself asking start-ups the same question a lot lately, which is, what is the single thing you can say that is unique to you, valuable to your user, true and simple. And all four things matter and most people fail on one of the four.

Gawain: My lady, are you real or are you a spirit?

Winifred: What is the difference? I just need my head.

Gawain: As will I before the year is up.

The graveyards are full of indispensable men.

IMO the best product will stem from a very strong mental model of the domain and the users. UXR can help you get to such a model, and validate it along the way, but it's important to view the syllogism as UXR -> model -> product, not UXR -> product.

This guy's walking down a street when he falls in a hole. The walls are so steep, he can't get out. A doctor passes by, and the guy shouts up, "Hey you, can you help me out?" The doctor writes a prescription, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a priest comes along, and the guy shouts up "Father, I'm down in this hole, can you help me out?" The priest writes out a prayer, throws it down in the hole and moves on. Then a friend walks by. "Hey Joe, it's me, can you help me out?" And the friend jumps in the hole. Our guy says, "Are you stupid? Now we're both down here." The friend says, "Yeah, but I've been down here before, and I know the way out."

"I'm just sayin' if you were in an accident, I wouldn't stop for a beer."

"If you were in an accident, I wouldn't stop for red lights."

For me, the action is the juice.

Vinson: The prisons and the graveyards are full of boys who wore the crown.

Marlo Stanfield: Point is: they wore it.

Burning Man is this ritual and the joke was always we burn it so that we can burn it next year.

You are not compelled to form any opinion at all about this matter before you, not to disturb your peace of mind at all. Things in themselves have no power to extort a verdict from you.

Convenience; quality; cost.

A great sign that you’ve found your calling is when you stop envying others.

When I was an intern, in one of the training presentations, a senior banker told us to distinguish between the process and the results. He said that we should focus on the process, which we can control, rather than the result, which is subject to luck. And here at Goldman, he said, we don’t punish people for losing money for the right reason. I have always loved asking questions, so I asked him, was anyone ever punished for making money for the wrong reason?

Gravity; weather; war.

You open the text and it wakes. This is the thing that cannot be killed. ‘Since we all breathe, all the time,’ he writes at the end of The Pale King, ‘it is amazing what happens when someone else directs you how and when to breathe.’ The novel does this, as much as any hypnotist. The rhythms of another person’s sentences do this, wind across the grid, Illinois, their attempts to keep their mother alive for all time by reproducing her idiom down to the letter. It’s in your mind now: levitation. It’s in your mouth now: Obetrolling. ‘And how vividly someone with no imagination whatsoever can see what he’s told is right there, complete with banister and rubber runners, curving down and rightward into a darkness that recedes before you.’ You open a text and it wakes. What is alive in it passes to the living. His attention becomes our attention. It can still be ours, sure. Do with it what you will.

Arrogance is the default culture that follows historical success.

After all, if people didn't have headaches, what would happen to the aspirin industry anyway?

i think coffee is a vacation drug. not worth it spending your tolerance to fill out spreadsheets 15% faster. use it like healthy cocaine to be more attentive at the museum

Democracy is the philosophy of making friends on equal terms, not of creating master-servant relationships. I want to have good friends, and I want to be a good friend to other people. But I do not want a good master or a good servant.

Spoon is cheaper than change the whole fence

Salvatore wandered through the world, begging, pilfering, pretending to be ill, entering the temporary service of some lord, then again taking to the forest or the high road. From the story he told me, I pictured him among those bands of vagrants that in the years that followed I saw more and more often roaming about Europe: false monks, charlatans, swindlers, cheats, tramps and tatterdemalions, lepers and cripples, jugglers, invalid mercenaries, wandering Jews escaped from the infidels with their spirit broken, lunatics, fugitives under banishment, malefactors with an ear cut off, sodomites, and along with them ambulant artisans, weavers, tinkers, chair-menders, knife-grinders, basket-weavers, masons, and also rogues of every stripe, forgers, scoundrels, cardsharps, rascals, bullies, reprobates, recreants, frauds, hooligans, simoniacal and embezzling canons and priests, people who lived on the credulity of others, counterfeiters of bulls and papal seals, peddlers of indulgences, false paralytics who lay at church doors, vagrants fleeing from convents, relic-sellers, pardoners, soothsayers and fortunetellers, necromancers, healers, bogus alms-seekers, fornicators of every sort, corruptors of nuns and maidens by deception and violence, simulators of dropsy, epilepsy, hemorrhoids, gout, and sores, as well as melancholy madness. There were those who put plasters on their bodies to imitate incurable ulcerations, others who filled their mouths with a blood-colored substance to feign accesses of consumption, rascals who pretended to be weak in one of their limbs, carrying unnecessary crutches and imitating the falling sickness, scabies, buboes, swellings, while applying bandages, tincture of saffron, carrying irons on their hands, their heads swathed, slipping into the churches stinking, and suddenly fainting in the squares, spitting saliva and popping their eyes, making the nostrils spurt blood concocted of blackberry juice and vermilion, to wrest food or money from the frightened people who recalled the church fathers’ exhortations to give alms: Share your bread with the hungry, take the homeless to your hearth, we visit Christ, we house Christ, we clothe Christ, because as water purges fire so charity purges our sins.

[paraphrasing]

The best vision is defined not by the strongest ability to refract light, but by the ability to identify and surface threats.

No muscles without strength, friendship without trust, opinion without consequence, change without aesthetics, age without values, life without effort, water without thirst, food without nourishment, love without sacrifice, power without fairness, facts without rigor, statistics without logic, mathematics without proof, teaching without experience, politeness without warmth, values without embodiment, degrees without erudition, militarism without fortitude, progress without civilization, friendship without investment, virtue without risk, probability without ergodicity, wealth without exposure, complication without depth, fluency without content, decision without asymmetry, science without skepticism, religion without tolerance, and, most of all: nothing without skin in the game.

Every once in a while, there's a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but those days almost always include body counts.

Freedom is a sound, and pleasure is a right. Do it again.

Of course, winning is much better than losing. No argument there. But winning or losing doesn’t affect the weight and value of the time. It’s the same time, either way. A minute is a minute, an hour is an hour. We need to cherish it. We need to deftly reconcile ourselves with time, and leave behind as many precious memories as we can—that’s what’s the most valuable.

“Say, J, it took a lot of money to move to this new location, didn’t it?”

“That it did.”

“Loans?”

“Real big ones.”

“Will that check pay off those loans?”

“With change to spare. But …”

“How about it? What say you take on the Rat and me as copartners? No worry about dividends or interest. A partnership in name is fine.”

“But I couldn’t do that.”

“Sure you could. All you got to do in return is take in the Rat and me whenever one of us gets into a fix.”

“That’s no different than what I’ve done all along.”

Beer glass in hand, I looked J in the face.

“I know. But that’s how I want it.”

There’s that kind of money in the world. It aggravates you to have it, makes you miserable to spend it, and you hate yourself when it’s gone. And

We are served by organic ghosts, who, speaking and writing, pass through this our new environment. Watching, wise, physical ghosts from the full-life world, elements of which have become for us invading but agreeable splinters of a substance that pulsates like a former heart.

“A spray can of Ubik,” the girl answered, “is a portable negative ionizer, with a self-contained, high-voltage, low-amp unit powered by a peak-gain helium battery of 25kv. The negative ions are given a counter-clockwise spin by a radically biased acceleration chamber, which creates a centripetal tendency to them so that they cohere rather than dissipate. A negative ion field diminishes the velocity of anti-protophasons normally present in the atmosphere; as soon as their velocity falls they cease to be anti-protophasons and, under the principle of parity, no longer can unite with protophasons radiated from persons frozen in cold-pac; that is, those in half-life. The end result is that the proportion of protophasons not canceled by anti-protophasons increases, which means—for a specific time, anyhow—an increment in the net put-forth field of protophasonic activity… which the affected half-lifer experiences as greater vitality plus a lowering of the experience of low cold-pac temperatures. So you can see why regressed forms of Ubik failed to—”

Joe said reflexively, “To say ‘negative ions’ is redundant. All ions are negative.”

I know some of you were top of your class in high school. Maybe you're used to getting 100% on math tests. Well, this is engineering, not math. If you graduate at the top of your engineering class, we should fail you. It means you didn't learn engineering. You wasted your time. Unless you're going to grad school, nobody in the world cares if you got an 80% or a 99%. Do as little work as you can, to learn most of what we're teaching and graduate with a passable grade and get your money's worth. That's engineering.

remember if you build an audience by saying things only an idiot would find useful, your whole audience will be idiots

Is this world we have made a world in which lovers may thrive?

Sweetie, no one is coming. To see how good we have done/are doing. It is just us. Forever. Until a flood gets us or the air or food stops coming.

In that instant, she saw it: God, she loved her life so much. The family of ducks that sometimes came waddling across the yard like they owned the place. The way Derek had recently started eating dinner with his winter hat on, elbows on the table, like a little trucker. Last week, Keith had arranged the plastic mini-animals on the windowsill (giraffe, cow, stork, penguin, elk) in a circle around a corn kernel and, in the elk’s antlers, had stuck a Post-it note: “Worshipping some mysterious object.”

How do we do that? she said. Drop it?

You just tell me to drop it, he said.

Now? she said.

Now works, he said.

It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.

Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.

It was about a small band of Inuit travelers he met nearly a century ago: “Halfway there, the weather changed suddenly. Oddly, it wasn’t the cold that nearly killed them, but heat. During the night their snow huts caved in and the frozen bits of skin, rotted meat and bones used to construct their sleds thawed and were eaten by the dogs. They had no food and no way to travel. After eating their dogs they began to starve. Atagutaluk then ate the bodies of her husband and children. When Peter met Atagutaluk she had since married the village leader. ‘I got a new husband, and got with him three new children. They are all named for the dead ones that only served to keep me alive so they could be reborn.’”

I am in this moment hosted by anonymous craftspeople long gone, or rather by their ideas and labor, surrounded by more ghosts in the books in the room and other remnants of trees, the language I speak, the body I inhabit with the adaptations and limitations of innumerable ancestors running through it, the city around me, the countless gestures, acts, devotions, that keep making the world.

Cooking is likewise a mode of transformation and a pleasure to which I often repair, and it sometimes seems so pleasurable because it is the opposite of writing; it engages all the senses; it’s immediate and unreproduceable and then it’s complete and eaten and over. The tasks are simple, messy, fragrant, and brief, and success and failure are easy to determine.

The process is called “hematopoiesis,” from the ancient Greek words for blood and for making. Poetry comes from the same word, poiesis, and it belies Plato’s argument that art is only imitation. Our word for poetry is their word for all the making in the world, of chairs, of houses, of bombs, of books, of blood, of gods. Making a poem is like making a chair; a poem is as real as a chair and sometimes more useful.

Why go to Paradise when the dishes aren’t done?

He felt … almost clean. It was the emotion, never commented upon by the poets, enjoyed by those who feel that, for once, they are earning their pay.

I stopped falling asleep with headphones on when I started falling asleep with other people in my bed.

You've been with us for the Wonder-bread years; that's all about to change. I now present on ESPN for the first time, the National Football League.

This is because we do not make objects to entice responses of strong affinity, like, “This is what I really want” or, “I must have this.” MUJI’s goal is to give customers a rational satisfaction, expressed not with, “This is what I really want” but with “This will do.” “This is what I really want” expresses both faint egoism and discord, while “This will do” expresses conciliatory reasoning. In fact, it may even incorporate resignation and a little dissatisfaction. MUJI’s goal is to sweep away that slight dissatisfaction, and raise the level of the response, “This will do” to one filled with clarity and confidence.

Too many things have happened already / and there is too much already for us to do.

There is also a cow Whose eyes the soldiers Took out with a knife And lit straw under its tail So it would run blind Over a minefield And thereafter into my head From time to time

you are only as powerful as the stupidest question you are willing to ask

I've been rich. Easier than being broke, harder than doing just fine.

At that specific point in time, every member of his staff was chugging the Jimmy Kool-Aid. That’s the only way these things can work. Dozens of people had placed their careers in his hands, including me: I had (effectively) given up my ESPN column, left Boston, left my family and dragged my fiancée to Los Angeles, simply because I had grown up idolizing Letterman’s NBC show — like Jimmy, actually — and always wanted to write for something similarly inventive. Jimmy and I spent the summer of 2002 talking on the phone and trading e-mails, and at some point, I made the decision, “I believe in this guy.” So on the biggest professional day of his life, with that shadow hanging over both of us, I needed a really good answer for the question, “How you feeling?”

Eight and a half years have passed. I can’t remember how Jimmy answered, just what his face looked like. You wouldn’t call it nervous, you wouldn’t call it overwhelmed, you wouldn’t call it anything … he didn’t fucking know.

Life will deliver a few moments when something substantial is about to happen, when you know it’s substantial, when you’ve done everything you could to prepare for the moment, but still, you just don’t know. And it would be foolish to pretend otherwise. I felt that way when I was getting married, when both of my kids were being born, when I graduated college,4 and incredibly, when I was standing in front of that stupid Carl’s Jr. Oh my God. There is no stopping this now. Please tell me this will turn out all right. You take a leap of faith with life. You inhale and exhale. You hope.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.

Isn't it lucky that no one is ever satisfied?

The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.

In a decade of working closely with other managers I’ve seen that there are almost always chronic under-performers that should be managed out. I believe that doing this quickly does more for team performance than any amount of rewards for top performers ever could. Sure, it destabilizes the team when someone leaves. Perhaps we can improve this by making attrition more transparent and natural. We tend to regard attrition targets and employee turnover as a “dystopian nightmare,” but I don’t see why it has to be. Given that a successful enterprise must precisely transcend the individual, one way to make the enterprise more antifragile is to make it less dependent on individuals. This is a radical shift away from the kinds of heroics and 10x impact that we have conventionally celebrated in Silicon Valley, but I believe it is time for that to change. A truly enlightened team knows that its time will end, and still accelerates towards that end, whatever mystery lies beyond.

It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be very intelligent.

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.

I wake up & it breaks my heart. I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart. I go outside. I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits. The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world. I run from end to end like fingers through her hair. There are no borders, only wind. Like you, I was born. Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming. Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.

The top three investing skills are: patience, temperament, and having your career coincide with a 30 year uninterrupted decline in interest rates.

Schooling has to do with gaining access to skills but there is no transformation. Education is about the formation of attention…you attend to things that matter. It’s about the cultivation of a self so that you’re able to have a sense of who you are based on integrity, honesty and decency…It is about the maturation of a soul that you learn how to muster the courage to think critically, the courage to love, to stay in contact with the humanity of others.

If we wait until we feel good, we'll never train.

We've been sleeping. We've had each other, and Ferrix, our work, our days. We had each other, and they left us alone. We kept the trade lanes open, and they left us alone. We took their money and ignored them, we kept their engines churning, and the moment they pulled away, we forgot them. Because we had each other. We had Ferrix. But we were sleeping. I've been sleeping. And I've been turning away from the truth I wanted not to face. There is a wound that won't heal at the center of the galaxy. There is a darkness reaching like rust into everything around us. We let it grow, and now it's here. It's here and it's not visiting anymore. It wants to stay.

You need to run, climb, kill!

You need to help each other.

You see someone who's confused, someone who is lost, you get them moving and you keep them moving until we put this place behind us.

There are 5,000 of us.

If we can fight half as hard as we've been working, we will be home in no time.

One way out!

One way out!

One way out!

My general view on beliefs is that we get to choose them, so we should choose empowering beliefs.

The lawnmower can't have empathy; the lawnmower can't think about opensource.

Do all the other things, the ambitious things — travel, get rich, get famous, innovate, lead, fall in love, make and lose fortunes, swim naked in wild jungle rivers (after first having it tested for monkey poop) – but as you do, to the extent that you can, err in the direction of kindness. Do those things that incline you toward the big questions, and avoid the things that would reduce you and make you trivial. That luminous part of you that exists beyond personality — your soul, if you will — is as bright and shining as any that has ever been. Bright as Shakespeare’s, bright as Gandhi’s, bright as Mother Teresa’s. Clear away everything that keeps you separate from this secret luminous place. Believe it exists, come to know it better, nurture it, share its fruits tirelessly.

The legs feed the wolf.

Just ten minutes ago, I was running through the grass.

Here at Belavista, everybody knows.

You are personally responsible for becoming more ethical than the society you grew up in.

It’s not about what feels good. It’s about what survives.

The paradox is that any business that’s large enough to have functional silos must pull together as if these organizational delineations barely exist.

No strategy is better than its execution.

Doubt is healthy until it eclipses knowledge.

Love is the process of deciding on familiarity.

Things are precious before they are contributory.

As a nation, we drink the way we exercise: too little and too hard.

It isn't stubbornness. It's just that, once you've seen giants, you don't forget so easily.

One real thing is closer to God than all the diagrams in the world.

If you take all your meals seriously, none of them gets a chance to matter.

Paradox is the only basket large enough to hold truth.

What is good is difficult, and what is difficult is rare.

This is no time for cost-counters: It is time to be very rich or very poor - or both at once.

Why do we marry, why take friends and lovers? Why give ourselves to music, painting, chemistry or cooking? Out of simple delight in the resident goodness of creation, of course; but out of more than that, too. Half earth's gorgeousness lies hidden in the glimpsed city it longs to become.

Pricing is how you learn about products.

There is no point in having a 5-year plan in this industry. With each step forward, the landscape you're walking on changes. So we have a pretty good idea of where we want to be in six months, and where we want to be in 30 years. And every six months, we take another look at where we want to be in 30 years to plan out the next six months.

It's a little bit shortsighted and a little bit not. But any other approach guarantees everything you release is already obsolete.

1. Cutting down trees spoils the beauty of the landscape. I would not like to live where there were no trees.
2. There are few birds where there are no trees. They have no place to make their homes.
3. Taking away the trees takes away the protection from our tender fruit trees. Where there are no trees the snows melt and go off too rapid- ly; the moisture that should sink into the soil is carried awav in the floods. Because our forests are taken away we have severe droughts every year.

One full grown elm tree gives out fifteen tons of moisture in twenty-four hours. A large sunflower plant gives off three pints of water in one day.

The trees give us lumber, fuel, wood, pulp for newspapers, cork, bark for tanning, wild fruits, nuts, resin, turpentine oils and various products for medicines.

1. We should have greater extremes of heat and cold if it were not for the trees and forests.
2. The leaves of trees catch the rain and hold it a little while; then they drop the water a little at a time; this is better for the ground.
3. The old leaves make a deep sponge carpet in the woods and this keeps the ground from freezing. If the earth does not freeze it takes up the rain better.

Magic has a way of uniting things that ought to be together.

My doing has been my undoing. My folly, my fate.

Even the rescue dogs showed signs of distress and depression.

If you can see a mountain lion, that means it isn't hunting you.

In her 30s still making first breakup music. Go sell some drugs.

You are about to die because the room is overheating. You've tried everything to get them to turn down the heat but for whatever reason the people monitoring the cameras aren't doing anything. You have a can of soup and there's a famous painting protected by glass

Probably no one then appreciated the comfort of having news arrive too late for action.

What was glory but a constellation of individual glories?

During WWI, black soldiers boarding trains to leave Oklahoma City held banners that read, DO NOT LYNCH OUR RELATIVES WHILE WE ARE GONE.

Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions. Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments. When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions. Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision. Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on. Be worried about the propriety of any decision -- raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

humans love language so much we taught sand how to speak

The same event could happen to four different people and one would deem it a coup, another kismet, another ironic, another auspicious. A coup signified chaos, kismet signified fate, irony signified order, auspicious signified faith. Meanwhile, odds were quantifiable but chances were not. Chances were abstract and 'for' whereas odds were concrete and 'against'. Hopeful people used 'chances' in the same spots where skeptical people used 'odds'.

“Do you feel heroic?” “No.” “Then you probably aren’t.”

If there is a secular equivalent of standing in a great spired cathedral with marble pillars and streams of mystical light slanting through two-tier Gothic windows, it would be watching children in their little bedrooms fast asleep.

Whatever relaxes you is dangerous.

“I’ll give anyone in this car five dollars,” Heinrich said, “if they can name the population of Bolivia.” “Bolivians,” my daughter said.

He’d once told me that the art of getting ahead in New York was based on learning how to express dissatisfaction in an interesting way.

I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.

Life is a never-ending succession of NFL teams adding ping pong tables w/stories about how they're finally coming together as a family and enjoying each other's company, and NFL teams removing ping pong tables w/stories about how they're finally taking football seriously.

Himmler was some kind of agriculturalist who married a nurse. We need to understand that concentration camps were the product of the joint imagination of a hospital nurse and a chicken farmer. A hospital combined with a barnyard: that's the fantasy that was behind the concentration camps.

And the strangest thing about the nightmare street was that none of the millions of things for sale were made there. They were only sold there. Where were the workshops, the factories, where were the farmers, the craftsmen, the miners, the weavers, the chemists, the carvers, the dyers, the designers, the machinists, where were the hands, the people who made? Out of sight, somewhere else. Behind walls. All the people in all the shops were either buyers or sellers. They had no relation to the things but that of possession.

when they burned the library of Alexandria the crowd cheered in horrible joy. They understood that there was something older than wisdom, and it was fire, and something truer than words, and it was ashes

On a personal level, once I discovered that clothes could be used as a weapon to fight the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, it became one of the defensive elements available to me. I nurtured this device, experimented with it, and came to understand how I could use it effectively. And it’s helped me out of many tight spots and led me into many lovely situations. I have no doubt it can do the same for you.

Insist on comfort from your clothes. If you’re uncomfortable, it shows, and you’ll make others feel uncomfortable.

When people are pressured to meet a target value there are three ways they can proceed

1. They can work to improve the system
2. They can distort the system
3. Or they can distort the data

We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate. To have assumed that particular fate so early was the peculiarity of my generation. I think now that we were the last generation to identify with adults.

The public life of liberal Hollywood comprises a kind of dictatorship of good intentions, a social contract in which actual and irreconcilable disagreement is as taboo as failure or bad teeth, a climate devoid of irony.

In fact a swimming pool requires, once it has been filled and the filter has begun its process of cleaning and recirculating the water, virtually no water, but the symbolic content of swimming pools has always been interesting: a pool is misapprehended as a trapping of affluence, real or pretended, and of a kind of hedonistic attention to the body. Actually a pool is, for many of us in the West, a symbol not of affluence but of order, of control over the uncontrollable. A pool is water, made available and useful, and is, as such, infinitely soothing to the western eye.

We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.

Work is happening at all levels. Always. Work is always fractal and nested. The questions is who is operating where and how.

When it was young, I drove it hard. I fed it whatever was to hand, or didn't feed it at all. It slept only when I no longer needed its labor at the end of a long day. Day after day of steady work, night sleep sacrificed for more work; It didn't seem to mind. It could run, it could climb, it could carry heavy loads. It was never the loveliest of its kind, but it had endurance and strength beyond what some others possessed. It still does, but it pays more dearly when what I demand exceeds what I should expect of it. It never had fast reflexes, and now it's even slower to react.

The animal remembers every harsh thing I've done to it. I kept it too long in the cold, frostbiting its feet, and now every cold floor reminds it of what I did. I have degenerated its joints to keep to a schedule. Now its grip is fading. I risked its eyesight by staring endlessly at a screen, and now the colors are fading out of its day.

“There are no silver bullets for this, only lead bullets.” They did not want to hear that, but it made things clear: we had to build a better product. There was no other way out. No window, no hole, no escape hatch, no backdoor. We had to go through the front door and deal with the big, ugly guy blocking it. Lead bullets.

"Were they heroes?"

"No."

"Were they villains?"

"No."

"...What were they?"

"History."

While Hader still regards these filmmakers with awe, he says he no longer barrages them with questions. “It’s like going up to somebody who’s married and you’ve never been in love before. And you’re like, ‘How do you fall in love? What’s that like?’ Once you fall in love yourself, you’re like, ‘Oh, I have my own way of doing this thing.’ It takes the sheen off of it. ‘Oh, it’s that? Oh.’ The mystery’s gone.”

I can't hate him, he's so transparent in his self interest that I kind of respect him.

I know that there is nothing better for people than to be happy and to do good while they live. That each of them may eat and drink, and find satisfaction in all their toil—this is the gift of God.

Our streets are calendars containing who we were and who we will be next.

The problem with having a team named 'Responsible Innovation' is that when you cut it, you either have no innovation team or only the non-responsible team left.

Having a history differentiates humans from all other living species.

eventually you too will get bored of public vulnerability and become interested solely in making your apartment nicer

Stage 1: Mother’s bathroom

Early adventures splashing on Mom’s Shalimar/ No. 5/ Miss Dior/ Tabu/ Your-Memory-Here with the bathroom door shut. Belief that Old Spice/ Brut/ English Leather is the natural odor that God has caused fathers to emit after shaving.

Stage 2: Ambition and naïveté

Either given a perfume by an adult or inspired to buy one at puberty: a sophisticated thing that embodies an unknown world of adult pleasures and/ or a cheerful cheap spray to wear happily by the gallon.

Stage 3: Flower and candy

Phase of belief that feminine perfume should smell flowery or candy-like and that everything else is an incomprehensible perversion.

Stage 4: First love

Encounter with moving greatness. Wonder and awe. Monogamy.

Stage 5: Decadence

An ideology of taste, either of the heavy-handed or of the barely there. The age of leathers, patchoulis, tobaccos, ambers; or, alternatively, the age of pale watercolors in vegetal shades. An obsession with the hard-to-find.

Stage 6: Enlightenment

Absence of ideology. Distrust of the overelaborate, overexpensive, and arcane. Satisfaction in things in themselves.

(Typing on phone with blank expression bad posture) lets gooooooooooo

But there are generally two times to tell me when you fucked up. The moment it's fucked, or the moment it's unfucked.

Every successful business is full of people who spent money nurturing unremarkable talent.

Until there is substantial and repeated evidence otherwise, assume counterintuitive findings to be false, and second-order effects to be dwarfed by first-order ones in magnitude.

The head was mine, but not to use, not to think with; only to remember and not too much remember.

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

You talk like a timetable. Did you have any beautiful adventures?

This day completes my twentieth year: and yet I am good for nothing, and cannot even carry myself forward in the world: three long years I have yet to study in order to qualify myself for business: and then-oh! and then; how many more years, to plod along, mechanically, if I should live; before I shall really get into the world? Grant me patience ye powers! for I sicken, at the very idea: thus is one third of a long life employ'd in preparing to act a part during another third; and the last is to be past in rest and quiet waiting for the last stroke, which places us just where we were 70 years before. Vanity! Vanity! all is vanity and vexation of spirit.

Morning jogs are for the body, evening walks for the soul.

I’m told there used to be a notice on the door, until somebody nicked it: the unthinkable is thought here.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but, be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia, dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

Appleby was as good at shooting crap as he was at playing Ping-Pong, and he was as good at playing Ping-Pong as he was at everything else. Everything Appleby did, he did well. Appleby was a fair-haired boy from Iowa who believed in God, Motherhood, and the American Way of Life, without ever thinking about any of them, and everybody who knew him liked him.

Productivity is for people who don't have leverage.

Men went mad and were rewarded with medals.

Success is a worn down pencil.

I think gathering, at its best, is a continuous & practiced thing, like being a regular at a bar or going on a weekly run with a pack of friends.

A concrete act makes language irrelevant.

It is often regretted that children can no longer play or move freely outside because of the dangers of traffic; inevitably, many of the people who voice these regrets are also the drivers of cars, as those same restricted children will come to be in their time. What is being mourned, it seems, is not so much the decline of an old world of freedom as the existence of comforts and conveniences the individual feels pow- erless to resist, and which in any case he or she could not truthfully say they wished would be abolished.

An action movie should, like any other, follow the narrative traditions of literature. That means there should be subtlety, a slow build and a gradual bringing together of all the separate threads of the plot. To see all of it coming together slowly is very rewarding for the audience. But if you make everything go at 100 miles per hour from the outset, it loses any impact or meaning. I mean, if a flying truck lands on the bonnet of your car, it should be shocking and scary. But if stuff like that is happening constantly throughout the film, it becomes mundane. An action film can have too much action; picture an equaliser on a stereo, with all the knobs pegged at 10. It becomes a cacophony and is, ultimately, quite boring. Now picture the high-low variations in a film such as Jaws. The lulls, the high points: it’s essentially a well-choreographed dance with the viewer.

"The Gray Man" exists "in the gray" of Hollywood action movies — not jaw-droppingly incredibly, not astoundingly bad, just there. It's a movie that's made to be half-watched on Netflix while scrolling on your phone. Its greatest disappointment is that it knows what it has — Gosling, a great cast, a lot of money — and it still ends up being less than the sum of its parts.

I believe that there are three things in life that you must absolutely do yourself because nobody can do it in your place: keeping fit, following a diet, and accumulating culture.

When your vision of what you want to do is what you can do single-handedly, be an IC. The day your vision is bigger than what you can do single-handedly, you have to move toward management.

And the bigger the vision is, the farther in management you have to go.

Alas, poor gentleman, / He look’d not like the ruins of his youth / But like the ruins of those ruins.

I think about a lot of things. I think about the first time I ever saw a birch tree; about the last time I saw Julian; about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greek. Beauty is harsh.

“You know that thing Julian used to say,” said Francis.

“Which thing?”

“About a Hindu saint being able to slay a thousand on the battlefield and it not being a sin unless he felt remorse.”

I had heard Julian say this, but had never understood what he meant.

“We’re not Hindus,” I said.

If the modern mind is whimsical and discursive, the classical mind is narrow, unhesitating, relentless.

And I was happy in those first days as really I’d never been before, roaming like a sleepwalker, stunned and drunk with beauty. And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.

It's good to be annoyed by your family because that means you have one.

I had such a boring life.

Harrington took seriously the necessity of believing in ordinary people Often he told campus audiences, "If you consider your country capable of dem-ocratic socialism, you must do two things. First you must deeply love and trust your country. You must sense the dignity and humanity of the people who survive and grow within your country despite the injustices of its system. And second, you must recognize that the social vision to which you are committing yourself will never be fulfilled in your lifetime." Sometimes he put it with a Christianized gloss: "I am running toward the kingdom of humanity and I am aware that I will never see it. Perhaps no one will."

The latest entries in the MCU aren’t just mediocre to forgettable to outright bad, they don’t even have the ambition to be about anything. What is this about? Love? Not really. Family? That is mostly tacked on at the end. There is no there, here. No larger theme, no apparent interest in anything other than the quips, plot and cameos.

THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER is worse than bad, it’s a waste of time.

Art is primarily about ideas. Execution is secondary. When the execution overtakes the ideas, it becomes craft.

Yuri Orlov: [when Andre suddenly shoots a subordinate with the sample gun from the main table in the center of his palace] WHY'D YOU DO THAT? Andre Baptiste Sr.: What did you say? [aims at Yuri] Yuri Orlov: [pulls himself together] Well, now you're gonna have to buy it. It's a used gun! [pulls it out of Andre's hand. Andre's bodyguards draw on him] Yuri Orlov: How can I sell a used gun? [Yuri huffs and busies himself wiping and polishing it]

“My God, that’s crazy!” he exclaimed. “How could this be a good investment? I don’t think he ought to do it, do you?”

Goldstone thought it was time for some Merger 101.

“Listen, Ross, they have their reasons for doing this other than just buying the company,” he explained. He mentioned the $200 million in upfront fees Shearson would reap from a successful deal. He talked about the unmatched franchise benefits it would reap from having completed history’s largest LBO. Johnson’s problem was that he insisted on thinking in terms of the real world, real money, real investments. In effect, Goldstone said, this wasn’t the real world. This was Wall Street.

And it would include what Johnson dubbed the three rules of Wall Street: “Never play by the rules. Never pay in cash. And never tell the truth.”

People are vivid / and small / and don't live / very long —

Palaces are for royalty. We're just common people with a bank account.

"When a banker is talking about raising money, he’s your employee,” Sage would say. “When he starts writing the checks, you become his."

You've got swagger, you got flair, you got panache. What else is there?

Menelaos: I suffer terrible things. Orestes: Well, you screwed up.

I wanted to say, in another life, I would have really liked just doing laundry and taxes with you.

You know the first and greatest sin or deception of television is that it simplifies; it diminishes great, complex ideas, tranches of time; whole careers become reduced to a single snapshot. At first I couldn't understand why Bob Zelnick was quite as euphoric as he was after the interviews, or why John Birt felt moved to strip naked and rush into the ocean to celebrate. But that was before I really understood the reductive power of the close-up, because David had succeeded on that final day, in getting for a fleeting moment what no investigative journalist, no state prosecutor, no judiciary committee or political enemy had managed to get; Richard Nixon's face swollen and ravaged by loneliness, self-loathing and defeat.

Yes, we shall live, Uncle Vanya.

We’ll live through the long, long days,

and through the long nights.

We’ll patiently endure the trials that fate sends our way.

Even if we can’t rest,

we’ll continue to work for others

both now and when we have grown old.

And when our last hour comes

we’ll go quietly.

And in the great beyond, we’ll say to Him

that we suffered

that we cried

that life was hard.

And God…

will have pity on us.

Then you and I…

we4l see that bright, wonderful,

dreamlike life before our eyes.

We shall rejoice, and

with tender smiles on our faces,

we’ll look back on our current sorrow.

And then at last

we shall rest.

I believe it.

I strongly believe it from the bottom of my heart.

When that time comes,

we shall rest.

You can shear a sheep many times, but skin him only once.

If, like me, you lived through the civil-rights movement, the antiwar movement, you can never discard hope. I’ve seen social miracles in my life, ones that have stunned me—the courageousness of ordinary people in a struggle.

The office of every corporation should feel in his very heart – in his soul – that he is responsible, not merely to make dividends for the stockholders of the company, but to enhance the general prosperity and the moral sentiment of the United States.

Ross's philosophy is, "We're going to have a party, a very sophisticated, complicated party."

Invent only where you need to differentiate.

Mike McDermott : [sitting across from each other in a bar] If you had it to do all over again, knowing what would happen, would you make the same choice? Professor Petrovsky : [Smiling] what choice?

humility not often come big brained or think big brained easily or grug even, but grug often find "oh, grug no like look of this, grug fix" lead many hours pain grug and no better or system worse even

Yes, yes, your kung fu is perfect. Immaculate, pristine, Platonically Ideal Kung Fu from the highest plane of martial arts. But, and we hate to ask this—can you still do the accent?

I have a kind of alacrity in sinking.

A simple action, done carefully, turns into something more.

You pulled it off. First time ever. ...Or so you thought, so close to completing the move but then, as you land, your foot catching the edge of a plastic tray with your ma’s pot of oolong steeping inside. The tray now tracing out its own arc through the air, everything in super- slow-mo, your mother’s face somehow remaining calm through it all, the only flicker in her expression one of momentary concern, as the pot of scalding tea nearly hits you on its way down. She catches it, or almost does, the bulk of the pot landing on her palm, which must be impervious to pain, because she doesn’t yell or cry out, simply takes it, absorbing the KUNG FU KID Someday, I’m going to be Bruce Lee. blow, all of the liquid heat and force and letting no harm come to your stupid little head. Already you can see the red marks forming on her wrist and forearm, burns that will peel then scar then darken and firm up into reminders you’ll see years later. After you’ve gone to bed, you’ll hear her walking up and down the hall, going door to door asking your neighbors for aloe, but no one has any or no one has any that they are willing to part with, so she’ll settle for a small glob of cold toothpaste daubed onto the spot, left there thick and mint-green. You lie awake, hearing her come back into the room, bracing yourself for her wrath or fury or guilt trip, but instead you get something else entirely. Tenderness. A softening in her eyes. It’s the only thing worse than anger: advice.

Despite all our accomplishments we owe our existence to a six-inch layer of topsoil and the fact it rains.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs

Too many people on the bus from the airport / Too many holes in the crust of the earth

What do I think of Middlemarch? What do I think of glory?

Moralists don't really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately. And the child reprimanded. Centrism isn't change -- not even incremental change. It is control. Over yourself and the world. Exercise it. Look up at the sky, at the dark shapes of Coalition airships hanging there. Ask yourself: is there something sinister in moralism? And then answer: no. God is in his heaven. Everything is normal on Earth.

I should like to feel, if I lived to be old, that I had improved a great piece of land and built a great many good cottages, because the work is of a healthy kind while it is being done, and after it is done, men are the better for it.

Caleb was in a difficulty known to any person attempting in dark times and unassisted by miracle to reason with rustics who are in possession of an undeniable truth which they know through a hard process of feeling, and can let it fall like a giant's club on your neatly carved argument for a social benefit which they do not feel.

He came after Homer and before Gertrude Stein, a difficult interval for a poet.

Cascading is excellent for websites. Terrible for applications.

The limitations come from what people actually do with computers, as opposed to what the marketers expect them to do. On the whole, people don't want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper. Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so.

Still, I have the impression we are heading toward a future filled with the emperor's new words, where word processing cranks out fast-food prose, becoming to writing what Xerography has become to the office memo: a generator of millions of copies of contentless words assembled for appearance's sake - rarely read, much less reflected upon.

At Tekserve, all the employees were made of pure cane sugar, not corn syrup.

Before freedom and equality, could we have bread and meat?

One thinks with a watch in one’s hand even as one eats one’s lunch whilst reading the latest news of the stock market, one lives as one might always “miss out on something”.

Come on, Mav, do some of that pilot shit.

Frontiers are where you find them.

lizzo makes music for RAs

If it moves, salute it. If it doesn't move, pick it up. If you can't pick it up, paint it.

Slack is a bit like Adderall. Ask someone about it the week after they start using it, and they can’t praise it enough. Talk to them six months later, they’re back to baseline but now they have an addiction. And talk to them years after the fact, and they’re just regretful.

When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn't have the end without them.

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self-- never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.

One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

The best piety is to enjoy--when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth's character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight--in art or in anything else.

Our job is to taste free air.

I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.

"Follows here the strict receipt For that sauce to dainty meat, Named Idleness, which many eat By preference, and call it sweet: First watch for morsels, like a hound Mix well with buffets, stir them round With good thick oil of flatteries, And froth with mean self-lauding lies. Serve warm: the vessels you must choose To keep it in are dead men's shoes."

He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed.

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

Orson Welles is a giant with the face of a child, a tree filled with birds and shadows, a dog who has broken loose and gone to sleep in the flower bed. An active loafer, a wise madman, a solitary surrounded by humanity, a student who sleeps during the lesson. A strategy: pretending to be drunk to be simply left alone. Seemingly better than anyone else, he can use a nonchalant attitude of real strength, apparently drifting but guided by a half-opened eye. This attitude of an abandoned hulk, and that of a sleepy bear, protects him from the cold fever of the motion picture world. An attitude which made him move on, made him leave Hollywood, and carried him to other lands and other horizons.

THE ARMY IS NOW FULLY PREPARED TO FIGHT THE PREVIOUS WAR.

every decline is surfable

That McKinsey is being blamed for the wildly optimistic CNN+ subscriber projections is a good insight into why companies hire McKinsey.

God is to be believed in so far as he speaks of his gun.

Some kinds of work are more interruptible than others. If you do one of the less interruptible kinds, you have to arrange your life to make it hard to interrupt. This will be difficult, and will make you seem eccentric to most people.

You have to repot yourself every once in a while.

Obama: ah, i've built an opaque oversightless tech-panopticon that requires a benevolent philosopher-king. now to take a big sip of water

"Someone once asked me why McDonald’s is so successful. I said ‘our bathrooms are always clean.’

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘But that’s easy.’

‘Well,’ I replied, ‘Are your bathrooms clean?’"

Be good, and if you can't be good, be careful.

Using exaggeration to make his point, Alben Barkley of Kentucky advised a freshman, “If you think a colleague is stupid, refer to him as ‘the able, learned and distinguished senator,’ but if you know he is stupid, refer to him as ’the very able, learned and distinguished senator.’

Still, it turns out Egan’s novel does have a message: novelists have always been spies, and we’re watching you.

We are the orphans of our son.

Moscow man buys newspaper, glances at front page, throws it straight out. Next day: same again. And again. Eventually, seller snaps. "Why DO you do that?" "Oh, I'm just checking for an obituary" "But obituaries aren't even on the front page!" "Oh, the one I'm looking for will be"

Whatsa matter with you guys? Pretty girls wantin’ a dance, ‘n all yiz can think of is to beat up on each other?

I find that summer—particularly summer vacation—is what’s truly wasted on the young. Even in the summers where I worked 20 or 30 hours a week at some fast-food spot or convenience store, I still took the relative freedom of the days for granted. I still got to wake up late, stay out later, fuck around for most of my waking hours, and do it all again. Stripped of what I now appreciate as that exhilarating freedom, summer on the other side of adulthood can leave much to be desired. I don’t so much mind the increase in responsibilities, or the earlier alarm, or the more-constant temptation of sleep. But, like so much nostalgic longing, there’s a feeling that I can’t as easily access. Yet I know that even as you read this, you know that feeling, or something like it, even if our definitions of the feeling aren’t the same. It can be unearthed, sometimes, in a scene: a sunset, the taste of a drink, a waning bonfire, and yes, a song. Something to interrupt what otherwise might as well be a long series of hot days that keep getting hotter by the year.

Why when the various examples of a metropolis are defined by pedestrians, the number of cards, speed, or traffic, does Carrion analyze the Catalan capital using side streets? Because, says Carrion, in each side street "we find the affirmation and negation of the entire city." Those passageways, hyperlinks, connections between places or concepts that are netiher roads nor streets, ignore or elude by pausing the vertigo of traffic. Barcelona's side streets are footnotes, tunnels that take us "to what is beneath the page, beneath the urban text."

She finished 13th out of 15, which has nothing to do with her actually besting anyone, since, once again, she doesn't even do any tricks. Other people fell or certain events simply featured fewer than 30 competitors, which let her sneak in. That's her gameplan: show up and stay upright.

No, I already write about everything— & everything is salt, noise, struggle, hair, carrying, kisses, leaving, myth, popcorn, mothers, bad habits, questions.

One interesting thing that I've noticed about Stripe engineering culture (comparing 5 years ago vs today) is that it's now easier in some ways to make large, sweeping decisions. Previously, these decisions would get a lot of scrutiny from many senior ICs. Today, the org is so big that senior ICs can't keep an eye on everything.

‘There was once a man who was very stupid. When he got up in the morning it was so hard for him to find his clothes that at night he almost hesitated to go to bed for thinking of the trouble he would have on waking. One evening he took paper and pencil and with great effort, as he undressed, noted down exactly where he put everything he had on. The next morning, well pleased with himself, he took the slip of paper in his hand and read: “cap”—there it was, he set it on his head; “pants”—there they lay, he got into them; and so it went until he was fully dressed. But now he was overcome with consternation, and he said to himself: “This is all very well, I have found my clothes and I am dressed, but where am I myself? Where in the world am I?” And he looked and looked, but it was a vain search; he could not find himself. And that is how it is with us, said the rabbi.’

She reads a book about Zen and she writes down on a piece of paper the eight parts of Buddha's eight-fold path and thinks she might follow it. She sees that it mainly involves doing everything right.

In many respects the books are remarkable, and where they are best is on the concrete, material reality of Johnson’s life: the terrain he sprang from; the friends he betrayed; the furious political campaigns he ran; the dams and electricity lines he helped to get built; the elections he stole; the political machine he forged; the combat service he evaded; the fortune he accumulated in office; the powerful older men he cultivated; the Senate rules he mastered.

He used to say that there are only two sources of human vice- idleness and superstition, and only two virtues- activity and intelligence.

"I think we had already played 65 games maybe, and so we're on the way to the airport to go to Indianapolis and I said, 'Jud, what is Phil going to do?'" Kerr recalled. "We've already had 65 games. Michael hasn't been here for almost two years -- you think he'll start him? Will he bring him off the bench? What's he going to do?' And Jud, without skipping a beat, he goes, 'Steve, Steve, Steve, listen, as a general rule, when you have your own statue outside the building, you're in the starting lineup.'

Never trust how you feel about your entire life past 9pm.

Oh, you're experiencing a structural problem? Have you ever considered trying different personal choices instead?

A master of a profession knows another when he sees him

The standing of the States as the most powerful of the anti-colonial powers is an incalculable value to the Free World... thus the moral position of the United States was more to be guarded than the Tonkin Delta, indeed than all of Indochina.

One of the general themes that I've become more and more convinced by over time is that all the upside is in... all the expected value's in the upside tails and not in the median outcomes usually. And you should take that seriously. And it implies weird things, which I think are true. Like that often the right path is the one that very well might fail. You really should be thinking the whole time about what is the upside? What's it look like? Where is it? What can you do that will keep that in mind, even if you're not using it to make everyday decisions, but from a high-level strategy perspective

The message of many things in America is "Like this or die."

Commit all your cruelties at once.

It was then that she told me how she had loved me before she ever met me. She had loved me from the moment she heard my name, uttered by her father in this form: Zeno Cosini, an ingenuous fellow who widened his eyes when he heard any kind of commercial stratagem mentioned, and hastened to make a note of it in an order book, which he would then misplace.

I understood finally what perfect human health was when I realized that for her the present was a tangible truth within which one could curl up and be warm.

— At what point does an organization stop being a "startup" and become a "private company"? — When its inertia has reached a point where it can continue to succeed not because of its actions, but in spite of them.

My best thinking got me here.

[31] Ask yourself on some cadence: why does the team/project exist? If it didn’t exist, what would happen (which other team / system would fill the gap)? How is the team adding value to the company and how can it continue doing so in the future?

[32] Keep track of every other major project in your space within the company: you should be able to explain their technical design better than their own ICs. Grab any opportunities to debate scope with the leads of other similar projects: you should be able to articulate how your project fits into the larger ecosystem of options. Inter-team competition is healthy and necessary. Make friends with ICs in these projects: they understand your technical challenges better than anyone else in the company.

[33] Do not compete on raw performance or efficiency with other teams; this will escalate into an arms race where both teams waste time optimizing their systems for point workloads, generating apples-to-oranges comparisons, etc. Compete on fundamental design characteristics.

[34] If someone objectively has a better system for your use case and wants to take it on, go find something else to do.

I’d learned one very simple trick: say yes. Simply say yes. Like Joseph E. Levine, on “The Producers,” said, “The curly-haired guy—he’s funny looking. Fire him.” He wanted me to fire Gene Wilder. And I said, “Yes, he’s gone. I’m firing him.” I never did. But he forgot. After the screening of “Blazing Saddles,” the head of Warner Bros. threw me into the manager’s office, gave me a legal pad and a pencil, and gave me maybe twenty notes. He would have changed “Blazing Saddles” from a daring, funny, crazy picture to a stultified, dull, dusty old Western. He said, “No farting.” I said, “It’s out.”

the time in the front is the time in the back

And the thing, sadly, about production and consumption is that our culture has fashioned it so that we can engage in such acts alone, even when we are in a room full of people. We browse alone. We buy alone. We are so close to living and dying alone.

The beauty of people is that you become beholden to the fragility and waywardness of others, just as they are beholden to you. I know this because I have inconvenienced many a friend. I forget every birthday. I’ll take a week to respond to a text message. I used to get sad at parties and make people stand outside with me while I smoked. I don’t know how to drive. Everyone drives me everywhere. Being friends with me is like being friends with a tiny king who hasn’t found his kingdom.

It's not something where you think, Oh, I've got it done. I did it all day, hotdiggety. The truth is, all day long you try to do it, try to be it, and then in the evening if you're honest and have a little courage you look at yourself and say, Hmm. I only blew it eighty-six times. Not bad.

Be ruthless with systems; be kind with people.

Well, darkness is the absence of light, and the stupidity in that instance was the absence of me.

— Burr, you disgust me. — Ah, so you've discussed me!

The principle under which I try to live my life, not necessarily very well, is that nothing I have is really mine. They’re gifts, here for as long as they’re here, to be let go of one day. The cash in my pocket isn’t mine and if somebody needs it they should have it instead. My dog came into my life unlooked for and will one day depart. This stance isn’t really asceticism either, but if I were a good ascetic, I’d probably do a better job at living up to it. But surely this gift-like quality is also true of beauty, which is always gratuitous, always pouring itself out, which can be shared and shared without depletion. Pleasure too is a gift. These things are present in cold mornings, in the smiles of strangers, in mathematics. They do not need an argument. They won’t stay with us forever. You don’t earn them. They’re just given to you. Put out your hands.

Sometimes to prevent monkey business, we must create it.

social engineering is when you treat people as parts in a machine, social architecture is when you build machines out of people

If you close your eyes on a busy urban sidewalk the sound of everybody’s different footwear’s footsteps all put together sounds like something getting chewed by something huge and tireless and patient.

The State Bird of Massachusetts, he shares to Green, is the police siren

Before his death, Rabbi Zusya said "In the coming world, they will not ask me: 'Why were you not Moses?' They will ask me: 'Why were you not Zusya?

Anne Carson was born in Canada and teaches ancient Greek for a living.

i think its often missed among american leftists that the idea is that socialism and eventually communism is not supposed to be a more moral system, but such an abundantly more productive system that the moral issues that arise in capitalism no longer exist

As far as I know, everything breathes. Raccoon claws, palm trees, sotol, sandwich wrap silence hut.

In the park, you eat other plants.

Meetings are useful because they increase the communication bandwidth between the involved parties. But like many useful tools, they have pitfalls: they cause interruptions in people's days, they demand attention from all participants even when people aren't needed the whole time, and they don't create value on their own (that is, the value is created by subsequent actions to build or do things).

We can make our minds so like still water that beings gather about us that they may see, it may be, their own images, and so live for a moment with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life because of our quiet.

Chocolate represents that which is delightful. The haunted castle represents the allure of the unknown. The ghosts represent the imprint of the past. All of these things are important. However, don’t think for a moment that, because this game features ghosts in a haunted castle, it is an evil or negative game. On the contrary, I intend for this game to be positive, uplifting and life-affirming. However, if Stardew Valley mostly channeled the energy of the sun, Haunted Chocolatier channels the energy of the moon. Both are vital.

What’s wrong with looking after someone?

All the healthy and out-going activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at least he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here, 'I now that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.

ABSTRACTION IS A TYPE OF DECADENCE

Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.

Once you turn 23 it's actually impossible to be smart anymore. Smart is something that children are when they do well on a test. You have to find something else to be now.

Woman: He was a head counselor at the boys' camp, and I was a head counselor at the girls' camp. And they had a social one night. And he walked across the room. I thought he was coming to talk to my friend Maxine, because people were always crossing rooms to talk to Maxine, but he was coming to talk to me. And he said -

Man: I'm Ben Small of the Coney Island Smalls.

Woman: At that moment, I knew. I knew the way you know about a good melon.

Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?

The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.

Alice: I don't much care where.

The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn't much matter which way you go.

There is the way things are and then the way things appear, and it is the way things appear, even when false, that is often the truest. If I am remembered, it will always be by the four years I spent at Saturday Night Live and, maybe even more than that, by the events surrounding my departure from that show. As long as SNL exists, then so do I.

There are kobolds, and then there are kobolds, and then there are kobolds still.

In an effort to get people to look into each other’s eyes more, and also to appease the mutes, the government has decided to allot each person exactly one hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it to my ear
without saying hello. In the restaurant
I point at chicken noodle soup. I am adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long distance lover,
proudly say I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn’t respond, I know she’s used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you thirty-two and a third times. After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

The law, in its majestic equality, forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal loaves of bread.

[… People ask me] 'Where do you get your ideas from, Ms. Le Guin?' From forgetting Dostoyevsky and reading road signs backwards, naturally. Where else?

You two are pretty uptight for hanging out under a bridge.

I feel like everyone from Catullus to Carson has said some version of, You have to figure out how to train your instincts and then get out of the way.

I am just like my mother. I buy books and tell myself that I am buying wisdom and at the end of my life, I own a house full of books. When I was little, I thought that the water came out of the showerhead because it was crying. This is because I heard my mother crying and thought it was the showerhead.

Yale Law School is a funny place: Everyone you talk to says they’re there more or less for charity work, but somehow the graduates keep getting rich and famous.

I ate the best dessert of my life almost a decade ago in a town called Praiano, seven miles down the winding road that leads from the cliffside town of Positano toward the sea.

At the bottom of the road there is a tiny harbor where a man named Armandino runs a restaurant with his daughter. I ate lunch there, outside by the pier on a clear blue spring day. I was with the man loved, and we ate. We ate tuna preserved in olive oil, with little black olives and slivers of onion. Then pasta with baby clams, still in their shells.

Then there was a plate of seafood: baby octopus, no bigger than the pad of my thumb; pin-sized white bait; whole little anchovies; a single, whole red mullet, just longer from his head to tail than my hand. Each had been dipped in batter and fried and served with lemon. After lunch we had hard nut cookies and a kind of half frozen pudding. And then small dark coffees. After coffee, there was limoncello, made from the lemons that grow up and down the cliffs. When we finished our liqueur we sat, dazzled by the meal, the bright water, and the birds picking fish off rocks and letting them fall again, boats dropping in and out of the nearby harbors, which were sunk too deep into the cliffs' mouths for us to watch them dock.

Then Armandino came to our table carrying a bowl of dark, wet walnuts, still in their shells, and two half glasses of red wine. We explained that we were too full and had a distance still to drive that day. Armandino pressed the wineglasses down and cleared a space between them for the bowl of walnuts, and another for their shells. It would be better, he said. if we left lunch with the tastes of the next meal already in our mouths.

Cookies and lemon liqueur said nothing of dinner, but half sweet walnuts and wine began to whisper. Something of another hunger, another meal, of again finding a place to sit together, again finding something good to eat.

We nodded, understanding then, and began to crack and peel the nuts, still wet inside their shells.

We stopped talking and just peeled, watching thin filaments of walnut skin coming off when either of us hit on spots with good focus. We sipped our wine slowly and remained there, peeling and sipping, getting no drunker but more ready, until the sky began to darken, and it made sense for us to go.

It was rich only because it was virgin. And it could be virgin only once.

I have heard of one lucky man for whom undervalued vegetables turned to solid gold. Here is the story as I was told it:

A farmer who grew acres and acres of onions became weary of trying to sell his onions at home, so he filled a carriage with bags of them and struck out to seek his fortune. After much journeying he reached a country where onions were unknown, and when he demonstrated their wonders to the royal court, the king rewarded the farmer by filling all of his onion bags with gold.

The farmer returned home and told his story. So his neighbor, a garlic farmer, took the same journey, to the same land.

The court was again bewitched, this time by garlic, and the night after a great feast, where garlic soups got the pulses quickened, and garlic chicken drove people to ecstasy, the garlic farmer was rewarded; his garlic sacks filled to brimming with treasure. The man drove straight back to his native land, aching to see his riches. When he finally arrived, he opened his bulging bags to find them full of the kingdom’s most prized possession: onions.”

Chang describes himself as unhealthily obsessed with a hockey player, defenseman Rod Langway of the Capitals, because, he says, he was one of the last to play the game without a helmet. There is, perhaps, an important metaphor there for amateur Changologists seeking to sum up the young chef ’s career.

I often talk about the "Grandma rule" for travellers. You may not like Grandma's Thanksgiving turkey. It may be overcooked and dry - and her stuffing salty and studded with rubbery pellets of giblets you find unpalatable in the extreme. You may not even like turkey at all. But it is 'Grandma's Turkey'. And you are in Grandma's house. So shut the eff up and eat it. And afterwards say, "Thank you, Grandma, why, yes, yes of course I'd love seconds".

The slow blade penetrates the shield.

Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation.

One of my dad’s biggest pieces of business advice was this: “don’t go out of business.” He graduated from a photography program and became a professional photographer along with many of his classmates, and then over the course of a decade or so, a lot of them gave up or went out of business. Obviously it’s a joke - that the path to success is avoiding failure. But there’s some wisdom to the idea that just continuing to exist is a priority. Just surviving can give you an advantage.

Nobody gets sent to Valhalla unarmed.

I think my main takeaway from this experience was that when you buy from a vendor, you can’t help but buy a little of their culture along with the product. In the cases where that vendor is particularly strategic (say, a major infrastructure provider), you need to be OK with whatever bleed that vendor’s culture will have into yours.

we are all dogs in god's hot car

The French don't bathe often enough.

They can't.

They don't have real soap.

The Germans took the soap.

people desperately want to find people it is socially acceptable to be cruel to

Here's what [Friedman] says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

We went up and down streets, stopping and starting.

"O.K., which way are we going now?"

"West."

"No, we're going south."

We drove along in silence some more.

"Suppose I pushed you out of the truck now and left you on the sidewalk, what would you do?"

"I don't know."

"I mean, how would you live?"

"Well, I guess I'd go back and drink the milk and orange juice you just left on the porch steps."

"Then what would you do?"

"I'd find a policeman and tell him what you did."

"You would, hub? And what would you tell him?"

"I'd tell him that you told me that 'west' was 'south' because you wanted me to get lost."

At that time Jesus said, "I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned, and revealed them to little children."

The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I’m saying.’ So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it’s impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it’s too bad it’s impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: ‘How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean.’ Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like an hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its subject is, when exercised, tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.

Designers should be prepared to measure public taste, understand production problems, comprehend a budget and balance sheet, talk business on an executive level with a client, be salespeople, diplomats, psychologists, and be able to work intelligently with engineers

If you can find the thing you do for its own sake, the compulsive piece of your process, and dial that up and up, beyond the imaginary ceiling for that activity you may be creating, my experience is the world comes to you for that thing and you massively outperform the others who don’t actually like hitting that particular ball. I think the rest of career advice is commentary on this essential truth.

The thing I have noticed is when the anecdotes and the data disagree, the anecdotes are usually right. There's something wrong with the way you are measuring it.

This is non-obvious!

All of Ruby is X lines of code, and steady/growing slowly.

All of Stripe is 10X-100X lines of code, and growing quickly.

Why, in the half a year since I’d met her, had I specialized only in moats, strayed from the correct path of love, and degenerated into a perpetual moat-filling machine?

Listen to me, girls: Do you know the story of the prime rib roast? A woman invites some people over for dinner. She puts a superb five-pound roast on the kitchen counter. The guests arrive, she talks with them fora while in the living room, they drink a few martinis. Then she slips out to the kitchen to prepare the roast... and sees it's disappeared. Who does she see licking the chops in a corner? The cat."

"I know what happened," says the elder daughter.

"All right, what?"

"The cat ate the roast."

"You believe that? You're not dumb, but wait. The guests come rushing in and discuss what's happened. The five-pound roast has disappeared into thin air, the cat looks happy and well-fed. Everyone concludes the same thing as you."

"Then one of the guests suggests, 'What if we weighed it, just to be sure?"

"They're all a bit drunk, and think it's a great idea. They take the cat into the bathroom and put it on the scale. It weighs exactly five pounds. The guest who suggested weighing the cat says, 'There you go, the numbers add up. Now we can be sure of what happened."

"But then another guest scratches his head and says, 'Okay, now we know where the five-pound roast is. But then where's the cat?"

The things she wanted the baby to know seemed small, so small. How it felt to to to a grocery store on vacation; to wake at three a.m. and run your whole life through your fingertips; first library card; new lipstick; a toe going numb for two months because you wore borrowed shoes to a friend’s wedding; Thursday; October; “She’s Like the Wind” in a dentist’s office; driver’s license picture where you look like a killer, getting your bathing suit back on after you go to the bathroom; touching a cymbal for sound and then touching it again for silence; playing house in the refrigerator box; letting a match burn down to the fingerprints; one hand in the Scrabble bag and the IIIOUEA; eyes racing to the end of the Villette (skid the parts about the cretin, sweetheart); hamburger wrappers on a road trip; the twist of a heavy red apple in an orchard; word on the tip of the tongue; the portal, but just for a minute.

The flick of Joseph Campbell’s too-long fingernails in The Power of Myth, as he speaks of the creeper that climbed the coconut tree in his house in Hawaii, how the creeper knew where to go and where to turn its leaves, how it had a form of consciousness. “I begin to feel more and more that the whole world is conscious.” That “These are the eyes of the earth. And this is the voice of the earth.”

If all this was thinking, then what was the head?

Back in her childhood she used to have holy feelings, knifelike flashes that laid the earth open like a blue watermelon, when the sun came down to her like an elevator she was sure she could step inside and be lifted up, up, past all bad luck, past every skipped thirteenth floor in every building human beings had ever built. She would have these holy days and walk home from school and think, After this I will be able to be nice to my mother, but she never ever was. After this I will be able to talk only about what matters, life and death and what comes after, but she still went on about the weather.

The truth was I had always assumed that pleasure was being held in store for me, like something I was amassing in a bank account, but by the time I came to ask for it I discovered the store was empty. It appeared that it was a perishable entity, and that I should have taken it a little earlier.

Destroyed, that is, were not only men, women and thousands of children but also restaurants and inns, laundries, theater groups, sports clubs, sewing clubs, boys’ clubs, girls’ clubs, love affairs, trees and gardens, grass, gates, gravestones, temples and shrines, family heirlooms, radios, classmates, books, courts of law, clothes, pets, groceries and markets, telephones, personal letters, automobiles, bicycles, horses—120 war-horses—musical instruments, medicines and medical equipment, life savings, eyeglasses, city records, sidewalks, family scrapbooks, monuments, engagements, marriages, employees, clocks and watches, public transportation, street signs, parents, works of art. “The whole of society,” concludes the Japanese study, “was laid waste to its very foundations.”2698 Lifton’s history professor saw not even foundations left. “Such a weapon,” he told the American psychiatrist, “has the power to make everything into nothing.

If you ask her what is a favorite story she has written, she will hesitate for a long time and then say it may be this story that she read in a book once: an English-language teacher in China asked his Chinese student to say what was the happiest moment in his life. The student hesitated for a long time. At last he smiled with embarrassment and said that his wife had once gone to Beijing and eaten duck there, and she often told him about it, and he would have to say the happiest moment of his life was her trip, and the eating of the duck.

I’m not saying we’ll live to see some sort of paradise. But just fighting for change makes you stronger. Not hoping for anything will kill you for sure.

Dr. Lindsley told me that an old house will defeat you if you try to restore it all at once—from roof to windows, weather-boarding, jacking it up, central heating, wiring. You must think of doing one thing at a time. First you say to yourself: Today I am going to think about leveling off the sills. And you get all the sills leveled. Then you turn your mind to the weatherboarding, and gradually you do all the weatherboarding. Then you consider the windows. Just one window at a time. That window right there. You ask yourself, ‘What’s wrong with that part of that window?’ You must do it in sections, because that’s the way it was built. And then suddenly you find the whole thing completed. Otherwise, it will defeat you.

Hugo: I wanted this job for exactly the same reason as you did. Eve: And what reason is that? Hugo: I didn't want to die of boredom.

Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.

The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed. You waste years by not being able to waste hours.

[St. Vincent] said ‘I am so glad that I moved to New York City and met all the freaks like me.’ Those aren’t freaks, St. Vincent, okay? Those are attractive people with heavily vetted idiosyncrasies. Every eccentric fashion choice has been run through a think tank of NYU undergrads that would blow your hair back. You wanna see a freak? Go to Albany.

My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.

having fun is a skill you have to practice or you'll be bad at it

The mark of the immature man is that he wants to die nobly for a cause, while the mark of the mature man is that he wants to live humbly for one.

I saw all those people suddenly changing from indie software companies who made something with their labor and sold it and got money — those people would get money from their customers. Back in those days you would get checks for shareware. Or putting in credit cards online and getting their money and giving them a code or whatever. All of those people would suddenly change from that form of income to a new form of income. And that new form of income was every month you would get a single check signed from Apple.

Sylvie's knowledge, like Izzie's, was random yet far-ranging: the sign that one has acquired one's learning from reading novels rather than an education.

The essential thing "in heaven and in earth" is, apparently (to repeat it once more), that there should be long OBEDIENCE in the same direction, there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living; for instance, virtue, art, music, dancing, reason, spirituality-- anything whatever that is transfiguring, refined, foolish, or divine.

One disability rights advocate and blogger, Dave Hinsburger http://davehingsburger.blogspot.com, has proposed what he calls (if I remember right) the “midnight burrito test”: Can a resident wake up in the middle of the night and zap themselves a burrito for a late night snack just because they feel like it? If no, then it is probably an institution.

Sell cheap, tell the truth, don't cheat nobody, and don't take kickbacks.

A good conversation is like a game of catch.

I have a nephew who said he wanted a time machine with a ‘meanwhile’ button. Drawing is something like that for me. I feel like I go someplace I can’t recall — and when i get back, there is a drawing, and somehow i made it, though it’s like it has always existed.

What I was after: widest range of interests, ages, abilities, and anything that indicated the ability to work hard for a sustained period even when results weren’t immediately clear.

I realize now the best results came when I gave no instructions except “spend time on the assignment”.

Daily practice with images both written and drawn is rare once we have lost our baby teething begin to think of ourselves as good at some things and bad at other things. It is not that this isn’t true, but the side-effects are profound once we abandon a certain activity like drawing because we are bad at it. A certain state of mind- (what McGilchrist might call “attention”) is also lost. A certain capacity of the mind is shuttered, and for most people, it stays that way for life. It is a bad trade.

When I was your age, an investing mentor told me: "there are two kinds of investors, the ones who want to buy at 52-week highs, and the ones who want to buy at 52-week lows"

My favorite activity is inventing. An early arms control proposal dealt with the problem of distancing that the President would have in the circumstances of facing a decision about nuclear war. There is a young man, probably a Navy officer, who accompanies the President. This young man has a black attaché case which contains the codes that are needed to fire nuclear weapons. I could see the President at a staff meeting considering nuclear war as an abstract question. He might conclude: ‘On SIOP Plan One, the decision is affirmative, Communicate the Alpha line XYZ.’ Such jargon holds what is involved at a distance.

My suggestion was quite simple: Put that needed code number in a little capsule, and then implant that capsule right next to the heart of a volunteer. The volunteer would carry with him a big, heavy butcher knife as he accompanied the President. If ever the President wanted to fire nuclear weapons, the only way he could do so would be for him first, with his own hands, to kill one human being. The President says, 'George, I’m sorry but tens of millions must die.’ He has to look at someone and realize what death is—what an innocent death is. Blood on the White House carpet. It’s reality brought home.

When I suggested this to friends in the Pentagon they said, 'My God, that’s terrible. Having to kill someone would distort the President’s judgment. He might never push the button.’

Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.

(Describing Keynes) This is the most beautiful creature I have ever listened to. Does he belong to our species? Or is he from some other order? There is something mythic and fabulous about him. I sense in him something massive and sphinx like, and yet also a hint of wings.

Just take the ball and throw it where you want to. Throw strikes. Home plate don't move.

A warm space suspended in a void.

The quickest way to stop noticing something, may be to buy it—just as the quickest way to stop appreciating someone may be to marry him or her.

Poetry is an art of beginnings and ends. You want middles, read novels.

For long stretches of history, the life cycles of goods and services exceeded those of the human beings who produced and consumed them.

"Can you fix it?"

"No. But I can make it fly."

Prague, city of a hundred towers, heart of the world, eye of my imagination’s hurricane, Prague with fingers of rain, the emperor’s Baroque dream, the soul’s music flowing under bridges, Emperor Charles IV, Jan Neruda, Mozart and Wenceslaus, Jan Hus, Jan Žižka, Josef K, Praha s prsty deste, the chem engraved in the Golem’s forehead, the headless horseman in Liliova Street, the iron man waiting to be liberated by a young girl once every hundred years, the sword hidden in a bridge support, and today the sound of boots marching, which will echo for … how much longer? A year. Perhaps two.

The good thing about writing a true story is that you don’t have to worry about giving an impression of realism.

There were women, there were careless acts, there was London, there was France, there were legionnaires, there was a government in exile, there was a village by the name of Lidice, there was a young lookout called Valčík, there was a tram which went by (also at the worst possible moment), there was a death mask, there was a reward of ten million crowns for whoever denounced the gunmen, there were cyanide pills, there were grenades and people to throw them, there were radio transmitters and coded messages, there was a sprained ankle, there was penicillin that could be procured only in England, there was an entire city under the thumb of the man they nicknamed “the Hangman,” there were swastika flags and death’s-head insignias, there were German spies who worked for Britain, there was a black Mercedes with a blown tire, there was a chauffeur and a butcher, there were dignitaries gathered around a coffin, there were policemen bent over corpses, there were terrible reprisals, there was greatness and madness, weakness and betrayal, courage and fear, hope and grief, there were all the human passions brought together in a few square yards, there was war and there was death, there were Jews deported, families massacred, soldiers sacrificed, there was vengeance and political calculation, there was a man who was (among other things) an accomplished fencer and violinist, there was a locksmith who never managed to do his job, there was the spirit of the Resistance engraved forever in these walls, there were traces of the struggle between the forces of life and the forces of death, there was Bohemia, Moravia, Slovakia, there was all the history of the world contained in a few stones. There were seven hundred SS guards outside.

It’s better for authors to think persistently and write occasionally than the other way around.

libgen/scihub are of such monumental social/moral worth that their illegality delegitimizes the law as a whole

twitter is 90% someone imagining a guy, tricking themselves into believing that guy exists and then getting mad about it

I used to get benched for Acie Law.

In my interactions with patrons, I’ve been surprised to find that altruism is rarely the dominant force. Patrons mostly don’t think of themselves as paying for consumption of past work; they’re buying into production of future work.

The more of the details of our daily life we can hand over to the effortless custody of automatism, the more our higher powers of mind will be set free for their own proper work. There is no more miserable human being than one in whom nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work are subjects of express volitional deliberation. Full half the time of such a man goes to the deciding or regretting of matters which ought to be so ingrained in him as practically not to exist for his consciousness at all. If there be such daily duties not yet ingrained in any one of my hearers, let him begin this very hour to set the matter right.

I was working with a lawyer on a deal 15 years ago. The lawyer on the other side of the deal was newly minted. I said to my lawyer “we should be able to get pretty good terms, since he’s new.” My lawyer, who was one of the top ten deal lawyers in the world, according to American Lawyer magazine, sighed and said “we’ll get the exact same terms we would have gotten if he was an experienced lawyer, but it will take three times as long and he’ll convince his clients you’re trying to screw them.” That was exactly what happened. And that’s what happens in deals I’m in with newly minted angels who think it’s all so easy.

The rappers want to be ballers and the ballers want to be rappers.

god the men you put on this earth to build houses are shorting cruise line stocks

He was too fast when he had no answer ready, too aggressive when he had one up his sleeve.

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.

The alterations cost around £15, the dress cost £20, and when people asked me where it was from, I got to say I had sourced it secondhand and had it altered. I learned that this is the most satisfying response to be able to give to that question, because desirable objects appear even more so when they cannot be duplicated.

The output of knowledge workers is extremely skewed based on focus. The productivity tiers seem to be:

1. Less than 10% focused on the job at hand: meaningful risk of getting fired.
2. 10-50% focus: “meets expectations,” gets regular raises.
3. 50%+ focus: superstar, 10x engineer, destined for greatness.

1. How would I feel if I said yes to this request and it led to me not having time for an important request in the future?
2. Is it possible for me to suggest someone who could grow from taking on this opportunity or is better-suited for it?
3. Do I genuinely think this is high-value work? Would it matter if no one did it?
4. Do I want to do it?
5. Does this help me grow a skill I want to have?
6. Is this how I want to spend my non-core hours this week?
7. Am I okay with this work competing with my other goal of being an independent member of my new team?
8. Could I glue-work roll for it?

I think it's largely true, what I once heard a famous playwright say, that there are no truly stupid human beings, no uninteresting human lives, and that you'd discover this if you were willing to sit and listen to people.

Dying is a role we play like any other role in life: this is a troubling thought. You are never your true self except when you’re alone—but who wants to be alone, dying?

Alcohol is your friend with a knife.

She wants to go somewhere, she says. I don’t mean travel. Travel would be a distraction. That’s not what I’m looking for. And if I did go back to some place that I loved or where I was very happy (Greece, for example, where she’d had the romance of her life, or Buenos Aires, where she’d had her best-ever vacation)—well, you know what they say. Never return to a place where you were really happy, and in fact that’s a mistake I’ve already made once in my life, and then all my beautiful memories of the first time were tainted.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.

Smart people have a problem, especially (although not only) when you put them in large groups. That problem is an ability to convincingly rationalize nearly anything.

Best way I can describe being online is everyone speaks in the tone of Dr. House but they forgot the other half of that character, which was having a useful skill

Sincere enthusiasm is the only orator who always persuades. It is like an art the rules of which never fail; the simplest man with enthusiasm persuades better than the most eloquent with none.

1. Three posts a week, more or less.
2. One idea per post. If I find myself launching into another section, cut and paste the extra into a separate draft post, and tie off the original one with the word “Anyway.” Then publish.
3. No hedging, no nuance. If I’m getting in a twist about a sentence, take it out.
4. Give up on attempting to be right.
5. Give up on providing full links and citations.
6. Give up on saying anything new. Most people haven’t read my old stuff. Play the hits.
7. Give up on trying to be popular. I try not to filter myself based on what I believe will be popular. Some of my favourite posts get ignored. Some posts get popular and I have no idea why. Besides, terrible posts get buried fast if I’m posting three times a week. So post with abandon.
8. Give up on trying to be interesting. Readers will come to my site for what’s interesting to me, or not, it’s fine, just say what I think about whatever I’m thinking about.
9. But make it work for a general audience.
10. Only write what’s in my head at that exact moment. It’s 10x faster.
11. If it’s taking too long to write, stop.
12. Don’t use a post just to link to something elsewhere. If there’s a point to make, start with that.
13. Titles should be descriptive and have the flavour of the post. And rewrite the lede once the post is done so the whole thing gets to the point faster.
14. It’s ok not to blog if it feels like a chore.
15. Writing is a muscle.

[guy who knows about a second kind of lemon] oh is that a Meyer lemon?

One Weather alumnus remembers visiting Bill Ayers and opening the refigerator to find a stick of butter. "Butter!" he exclaims today. "I couldn't afford a piece of bread, and they had butter!"

why are we still here? just to suffer? every day i get emails

Understand people have a right to be tasteless.

If you're busy at work odds are you will eventually be replaced by a robot.

incentives are much better than orders because you get the same results but you can shift the blame down to the people following them

Literature can survive only by pursuing outsized goals, even those beyond all hope of achievement. Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares to imagine will literature continue to serve a purpose. As science begins to mistrust general explanations and solutions that are not narrow or specialized, the great challenge for literature will be to learn to weave together different kinds of knowledge and different codes into a pluralistic, multifaceted vision of the world.

Sometimes it seems to me that a terrible plague has struck humanity in the faculty that most distinguishes it, its use of words—a plague that manifests in language as a loss of cognitive power and immediacy, as an automatic tendency to reduce expression to its most generic, anonymous, abstract constructions and to dilute its meanings, blunt its expressive points, and snuff every spark that flies from the collision of words with new circumstances. I’m not concerned here with whether the origins of this epidemic can be traced to politics, to ideology, to bureaucratic uniformity, to the homogenization of mass media, or to the diffusion in schools of middlebrow culture. What interests me are the possible remedies. Literature, and perhaps only literature, can create the antibodies that might resist the spread of this language plague.

Among Zhuang Zhou’s many virtues was his talent for drawing. The king asked him to draw a crab. Zhuang Zhou said he would need five years and a villa with twelve servants. After five years he had not yet begun the drawing. “I need another five years,” he said. The king agreed. When the tenth year was up, Zhuang Zhou took his brush and in an instant, with a single flourish, drew a crab, the most perfect crab anyone had ever seen.

The demands of the publishing marketplace are a fetish that should not prevent experimentation with new forms.

On the other hand, being thrifty with time is a good thing, since the more time we save, the more we’ll be able to lose.

[Perseus’s] power derives from refusing to look directly while not denying the reality of the world of monsters in which he must live, a reality he carries with him and bears as his personal burden.

(To George Washington) If you are not great enough to have ambition you are little enough to have vanity.

A French gentleman who possessed a large library was asked an old question by a visitor, a question so often posed to those who own a lot of books:

"And have you read them all?"

This wise collector turned to his guest and, with an astonished look on his face, simply replied "No, and I haven't drunk all the wine in my cellar either."

"junior devs write bad code" sure but senior devs write bad systems and i can tell you right now which one's easier to fix

“She was the third girl.”

“The "third girl"?”

“Well, you know how it is these days. One girl takes a lease on a flat, her friend joins her in second-best bedroom, paying a little less rent. Then they have to find somebody for the room that's left. The third girl. That was her.”

Ideally, beauty and utility are mutually generative.

Graphic design — which fulfills esthetic needs, complies with the laws of form and the exigencies of two-dimensional space; which speaks in semiotics, sans-serifs, and geometries; which abstracts, transforms, translates, rotates, dilates, repeats, mirrors, groups, and regroups — is not good design if it is irrelevant.

Happiness means being just rushed enough.

The Chicago accent is the night shift, the factory worker, the airport baggage handler. It is firefighters, garbage collectors, and busdrivers. It is bad coffee, the funniest guy in the breakroom, and the six days a week for one day off with your family. It is neighborhood know-it-alls and backseat loudmouths. It is complaining about the weather, the mayor, the city that you love. It is a bbq with family and the first snap of a sausage when you bite into it. If the Chicago accent is ugly, then it is an acknowledgment that work in America is ugly, for nobody works like Chicago.

This is a hard philosophy. But then the soldiers' profession is a hard profession, in wartime. A lot of men like it, though, and even civilian soldiers have been known to stay on and make it their life's work. It has its excitements and compensations. One of them is that, since you have none yourself, you are relieved of any responsibility for a future. And everything tastes better.

It is absolutely true, for example, that when you think, when you know, you are going to die somewhere soon, every day has a special, bright, delicious poignant taste to it that normal days in normal times do not have. Another perversity of the human mechanism?

Some men like to live like that all the time.

This Art must abandon actuality and soar with becoming boldness above necessity; for Art is a daughter of Freedom, and must receive her commission from the needs of spirits, not from the exigency of matter. But today Necessity is master, and bends a degraded humanity beneath its tyrannous yoke. Utility is the great idol of the age, to which all powers must do service and all talents swear allegiance. In these clumsy scales the spiritual service of Art has no weight; deprived of all encouragement, she flees from the noisy mart of our century. The very spirit of philosophical enquiry seizes one province after another from the imagination, and the frontiers of Art are contracted as the boundaries of science are enlarged.

Do good work. There will be evidence.

Michael Polanyi coined the term “tacit knowledge” to describe something we only understand as part of something else. When we speak, for instance, we don’t focus on the sounds we’re making, we focus on our words. We understand how to speak, but would struggle to explain it. Tacit knowledge comprises the vast majority of what we know; we rely on it constantly.

When that knowledge begins to lead us astray, however, Polanyi tells us we that must delve into it. We must make it explicit. An explicit understanding of speech might be necessary for someone with a speech impediment, but also for a professional performer; to be at the top of your field, explicit knowledge is almost always required.

A rare exception to this rule is the chicken sexer, who can quickly and accurately determine whether a day-old chick is male or female. The two are indistinguishable to most, but an expert can classify a thousand chicks an hour with 98% accuracy. The knowledge underpinning this expertise has never been made explicit; a trainee is simply corrected by an expert, over and over, until their intuition is equally refined.

Held to this standard, however, we all fall short. No one’s sensibilities about software design are so refined that they can teach simply through demonstration. We have to distill our intuition down to principles, and let those principles guide us beyond the bounds of our intuition. Anything less is just rentier pedagogy; maxims stripped of any context, whose true meaning within a given situation can only be judged by a single person.

Literally there are two kinds of the narratives: though that come to an end, and those that do not. Moving images have been switching between the two since literally 1910 and every time it's hailed as a revolutionary innovation.

write as if you are letting them in on the conspiracy

But they suggest a compulsive awareness about time’s passage, a desire to displace anxious energy into nerdish ritual. The most fastidious list I maintained collects all the books I read this year. Looking back, it’s a reminder of how 2020 has felt less like a year than like a series of mini-epochs or eras, peaks and valleys.

I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies. Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound. When I die, I promise to haunt you forever. One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

And for all that — my expenses borne!

the habit of reading theology as one reads poetry — i.e. in a state of total vulnerability, without the mediation of reason — led me nearly to convert to catholicism, so i can't recommend it in good conscience

Instructions for living a life: pay attention; be astonished; tell about it.

The will to have nice things.

I become grateful to wake up every day knowing how I will spend it. I’m not building a cathedral, but I think about what building a cathedral would let me do, how it would allow me to move my hands in a task and see something monumental grow very slowly, with immense care. A bricklayer understands brick in a way that is devotional.

Repetition is devotional.

We came in to work every day and were treated like popes—a new manila folder for every task; expensive courier services; taxi vouchers; trips to three-day fifteen-hundred-dollar conferences to keep us up to date in our fields; even the dinkiest chart or memo typed, xeroxed, distributed, and filed; overhead transparencies to elevate the most casual meeting into something important and official; every trash can in the whole corporation, over ten thousand trash cans, emptied and fitted with a fresh bag every night; restrooms with at least one more sink than ever conceivably would be in use at any one time, ornamented with slabs of marble that would have done credit to the restrooms of the Vatican! What were we participating in here?

Come to your senses, World! The tone of authority and public-spiritedness that surrounds these falsehoods is outrageous! How can you let your marketing men continue to make claims that sound like the 1890s ads for patent medicines or electroactive copper wrist bracelets that are printed on the Formica on the tables at Wendy’s? You are selling a hot-air machine that works well and lasts for decades: a simple, possibly justifiable means for the fast-food chains to save money on paper products. Say that or say nothing.

Will the time ever come when I am not so completely dependent on thoughts I first had in childhood to furnish the feedstock for my comparisons and analogies and sense of the parallel rhythms of microhistory?

The feeling that you are stupider than you were is what finally interests you in the really complex subjects of life: in change, in experience, in the ways other people have adjusted to disappointment and narrowed ability. You realize that you are no prodigy, your shoulders relax, and you begin to look around you, seeing local color unrivaled by blue glows of algebra and abstraction.

The phrase "That was a good king" recurs throughout the poem, because the poem is fundamentally concerned with how to get and keep the title "Good." The suspicion that any moment a person might shift from hero into howling wretch, teeth bared, causes characters ranging from scops to ring-lords to drop cautionary anecdotes. Does fame keep you good? No. Does gold keep you good? No. Does your good wife keep you good? No. What keeps you good? Vigilance. That's it.

My own experiences as a woman tell me it's very possible to be mistaken for monstrous when one is only doing as men do: providing for and defending oneself. Whether one's solitary status is a result of abandonment by a man or because of a choice, the reams of lore about single, self-sustaining women, and particularly about solitary elderly women, suggest that many human women have been, over the centuries, mistaken for supernatural creatures simply because they were alone and capable.

Despite its reputation to generations of unwilling students, forced as freshmen into arduous translations, Beowulf is a living text in a dead language, the kind of thing meant to be shouted over a crowd of drunk celebrants. Even though it was probably written down in the quiet confines of a scriptorium, Beowulf is not a quiet poem. It’s a dazzling, furious, funny, vicious, desperate, hungry, beautiful, mutinous, maudlin, supernatural, rapturous shout.

Language is a living thing and when it dies, it leaves bones. I dropped some fossils here, next to some newborns.

There are thousands of cheeses, but only sixty types of shark.

Because that was a parent’s job: to provide shoulders.

Reducing social services and replacing them with punitive social control mechanisms works less well and is more expensive. The cost of housing people and providing then with mental health services is actually lower than cycling them through emergency rooms, homeless shelters, and jails, as numerous studies have shown. The drive to criminalize has more to do with ideology than effectiveness: the mentally ill are seen not as victims of the neoliberal restructuring of public health services but as a dangerous source of disorder to be controlled through intensive and aggressive policing.

A startup company isn’t an industrious venture that makes and sells a worthy product; a startup company is a plywood box containing a whiteboard with arrows and numbers on it and as few employees as possible, which gets passed around among progressively meaner and more craven moral dwarves until it can no longer sustain even the flimsiest illusion of extractable vitality, and then is dissolved.

You all keep coming to a gun fight with infographics.

In the words of Mark Neocleous, police exist to "fabricate social order", but that order rests on systems of exploitation – and when elites feel that this system is at risk, whether from slave revolts, general strikes or crime and rioting in the streets, they rely on the police to control those activities. When possible, the police aggressively and proactively prevent the formation of movements and public expressions of rage, but when necessary they will fall back on brute force. Therefore, while the specific forms that policing takes have changed as the nature of inequality and the forms of resistance to it have shifted over time, the basic function of managing the poor, foreign and nonwhite on behalf of a system of economic and political inequality remains.

Ellie Andrews: You know, this is the first time in years I’ve ridden piggyback.

Peter Warne: This isn’t piggyback.

E: Of course it is.

P: You’re crazy.

E: I remember distinctly my father taking me for a piggyback ride.

P: And he carried you like this?

E: Yes.

P: Your father didn’t know beans about piggyback riding.

E: My uncle, mother’s brother, has four children and I’ve seen them ride piggyback.

P: I’ll bet there isn’t a good piggyback rider in your whole family. I never knew a rich man yet who could piggyback ride.

E: You’re prejudiced.

P: You show me a good piggybacker and I’ll show you a real human. Now you take Abraham Lincoln for instance. A natural born piggybacker. Where do you get all of that stuffed-shirts family of yours?

E: My father was a great piggybacker.

My shit doesn't work in the playoffs. My job is to get us to the playoffs. What happens after that is fucking luck.

I do love watching sports though, which is something you have to develop as a Knicks fan. There’s an art and more than a bit of sadism in looking forward to watching a game you have no chance of winning.

Something I know is overrated is looking for a partner who makes you laugh. That's all well and good when things are um, well and good, but you can't pay the light bill with laughter.

We have slain a large dragon, but we live now in a jungle filled with a bewildering variety of poisonous snakes. And in many ways, the dragon was easier to keep track of.

It was snowing. And it was going to snow.

But what is a few days of feeling cold compared to a new albatross in the World?

When you’ve got 400 quarts of greens and gumbo soup canned for the winter, nobody can push you around or tell you what to say or do.

Got my house in order but never quite could give up / The drink, the way it confects me, the way I stay spoked / With what wrecks me.

“Everything breaks at a billion,” to quote an anonymous Instagram executive.

Art is how we decorate space; music is how we decorate time.

Instagram is a place where people can share beautiful photos of their lives, and when you engage in self-promotional behavior of any kind on Instagram it makes users who have shared that moment with you feel sad inside.

"Isn't your superior God?" "Yes, but it's his lieutenants who call the shots."

It’s ok to spend some of your time on snacks to keep yourself motivated between bigger accomplishments, but you have to keep yourself honest about how much time you’re spending on high-impact work versus low-impact work. In senior roles, you’re more likely to self-determine your work and if you’re not deliberately tracking your work, it’s easy to catch yourself doing little to no high-impact work.

No, no, let us work just one more hour; let us compose just one more page. Of course we shall not get the book done, but we must keep on trying to finish a little more…When you have a great and difficult task, something perhaps almost impossible, if you only work a little at a time, every day a little, without faith and without hope, suddenly the work will finish itself.

You know, I never feel comfortable on these sort of things. Victims? Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever? If I offered you twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stopped, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money, or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare? Free of income tax, old man. Free of income tax - the only way you can save money nowadays.

You started out with nothing and you've made it far. I started out with eight million dollars, and I've still got eight million dollars — I just can't seem to get ahead.

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

Knowledge which gives a new manufacturing process that turns inventory into throughput is operational expense; which we intend to sell is inventory; which is used to build the system is investment.

Every time I open the door somebody walks in.

You have 100 crows on a tree. You shoot 50 crows and feed all the food to remaining crows. How many crows will be there on the tree now?

Improving daily work is even more important than doing daily work.

Provider, parent, spouse, change agent.

When my friend does something stupid, he is just my friend doing something stupid. When I do something stupid, I have deeply betrayed myself.

It gets harder and harder to be free. Every time I need a larger labor to be at the end of.

Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism.

Most power just looks like an easier-than-average life.

Legitimacy is a function of capacity.

The social industry doesn’t just eat our time with endless stimulus and algorithmic scrolling; it eats our time by creating and promoting people who exist only to be explained to, people to whom the world has been created anew every morning, people for whom every settled sociological, scientific, and political argument of modernity must be rehashed, rewritten, and re-accounted, this time with their participation.

A cartoon in the daily Lidové Noviny showed two men talking in front of the parliament in Prague: I am not worried about lustrations', says one of them.' I was not an informer. 'I was just giving orders'.

As in the past, so today: the real boundaries in central and eastern Europe are not between countries but between prosperous urban centers and a neglected hinterland.

everyone else, minds rotted from overconsumption of narrative media: conviction! passion! belief!

me, only reading nonfiction and poetry (a kind of nonfiction): administrative capacity

I do think that people who confess to ten illegitimate children probably have more.

We should not indulge the sirens of retrospective determinism, however seductive.

new liver, same eagles

The very act of forming a political grouping forces one to start playing a power game, instead of giving truth priority. Thee are perhaps impractical methods in today's world and very difficult to apply in daily life. Nevertheless, I know no better alternative.

Ted Mosby : Okay, I'm gonna say something out loud that I've been doing a pretty good job not saying out loud lately. What you and Tony have... What I thought for a second you and I had... What I know that Marshall and Lily have... I want that. I do. I keep waiting for it to happen, I wait for it to happen and... I guess I'm just... I'm tired of waiting. And that is all I'm going to say on that subject.

Stella Zinman : You know that once I talked my way out of a speeding ticket?

Ted Mosby : Really?

Stella Zinman : I was heading upstate to my parents' house and was doing, like, 90 on this country road and got pulled over. So this cop gets out of his car and he kinda swaggers all over and he's all, like: "Young lady, I have been waiting for you all day." So I looked up at him and I said: "I'm so sorry, officer. I got here as fast as I could."

...the onanistic satisfaction of producing samizdat for the same two thousand intellectuals, all of whom also write it.

Success will fit you like a shroud.

I’m back at the primal source of poems: wind, sea / and rain, the market and the salmon

There is no finer investment for any community than putting milk into babies.

That's sweet of you to look out for me, but I liked the job I had. And when I lost it, I didn't pitch anything. I didn't stage a nutty. I fought you, I lost, I had a drink, I took a shower. 'Cause that's how it is in the NBA. You know what I do when I win? Two drinks!

Contrary to popular opinion, you can read too many books. It did something to my brain at an impressionable age. It left me not quite adjusted to real life; always one step removed. An observer, always seeking out dramas, consciously or otherwise, but in a dislocated way. I would look out of the windows of cars, buses, trains and see the projections of cinema on the panes, rather than a solid world go by. It seemed to instil in me a dangerous curiosity and an even more dangerous hesitancy.

Home is where one starts from. As we grow older The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated Of dead and living. Not the intense moment Isolated, with no before and after, But a lifetime burning in every moment And not the lifetime of one man only But of old stones that cannot be deciphered. There is a time for the evening under starlight, A time for the evening under lamplight (The evening with the photograph album).

A helpful thing to remember is that large companies spend thousands of dollars a day just on printer paper.

If everything you do is easy, you’re underachieving.

No, I spend my days so passively because of my very sensitivity to such things—I lack the energy to withstand the toll they take on my nerves. And so once I make a promise, it distresses me deeply if I do not fulfill it.

In the old days children fed their parents, but these days they devour them.

But I believe that a commonplace idea stated with passionate conviction carries more living truth than some novel observation expressed with cool indifference. It is the force of blood that drives the body, after all. Words are not just vibrations in the air, they work more powerfully than that, and on more powerful objects.

[To move on from twitter, one must] deeply invest in your personal and professional relationships—even boring parts—and decide to master your disciplines. As a result your healthier daily life begins to offer more engagement and stimulus than can be provided by this platform, until you forget to visit.

Upon being asked by the prosecuting counsel whether this was a novel he would let his 'wife or maidservant' (sic) read, one witness replied that this would not trouble him in the least: but he would never let it into the hands of his gamekeeper.

Our nation stands for democracy and proper drains.

Imagine taking the very sharpest thought you had each day for two years and then adding it to a pile. If someone walked by and looked at your pile of best thoughts, they’d think you were a genius. They might see your thoughts and feel things. It might be an encounter with the sublime. This is the promise of revision and the good news. The bad news is that to get there, you have to start by rereading your own work.

“A lot of time in the studio, we’d be working on songs and there’d be a version that might be, you know, uber minimalist. And then I’d say like, ‘Ah, I want it to be shaggier, I want it to be crunchier.’ Those were words that came up a lot. ‘Shaggy’. ‘Crunchy’. And I think really what I was saying is, ‘I want to feel a little more alive’. Those are the things that signified life to me.”

my enthusiasm has been greater than my competence and it's the people that bet on the enthusiasm more than the competence.

Because in the intervening 20 years, remember, you've got this incredible training program for the mind: they are working every hour in the startup, they're talking with the smartest people, they're constantly getting new information, they're hiring, they're firing, that pattern recognition of the executives get so much better. They've got a million failed initiatives. So they have all these learnings of what not to do

Morty Applebaum bought a donkey from an old farmer for $100. The farmer agreed to deliver the mule the next day. The next day, the farmer drove up and said, "Sorry, but I have some bad news. The donkey died."

"Well, then, just give me my money back," said Morty.

"Can't do that,” replied the farmer. “I went and spent it already."

"OK, then. Just unload the donkey."

"What ya gonna do with him?"

"I'm going to raffle him off."

"You can't raffle off a dead donkey!"

"Sure I can. Watch me. I just won't tell anybody he's dead."

A month later the farmer met up with Morty and asked, "Whatever happened with that dead donkey?"

"I raffled him off. I sold five hundred tickets at two dollars apiece and made a profit of $998."

"Didn't anyone complain?" asked the farmer.

"Just the guy who won,” said Morty. “So I gave him his two dollars back."

1. Nobody figures out how to code perfectly their first time.
2. It's mostly luck.
3. Learn just the right skills, in the right order.
4. Avoid perfectionism.
5. Not doing something is sometimes the best way to learn something.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked

There are no leopards in the state of Connecticut.

The manipulation of fervor is the germ of bondage.

The sense that there was no choice and that the government knew best made the first generation of post-war England, in novelist David Lodge’s recollections of his youth, ‘cautious, unassertive, grateful for small mercies and modest in our ambition,’ in marked contrast to the generation that would succeed them.

In 1828, the German poet Heinrich Heine made the already familiar observation that ‘it is rarely possible for the English, in their parliamentary debates, to give utterance to a principle. They discuss only the utility or disutility of a thing, and produce facts, for and against.’

The genre is dead. Invent something new. Invent a man and a woman naked in a garden, invent a child that will save the world, a man who carries his father out of a burning city. Invent a spool of thread that leads a hero to safety, invent an island on which he abandons the woman who saved his life with no loss of sleep over his betrayal.

Invent us as we were before our bodies glittered and we stopped bleeding: invent a shepherd who kills a giant, a girl who grows into a tree, a woman who refuses to turn her back on the past and is changed to salt, a boy who steals his brother’s birthright and becomes the head of a nation. Invent real tears, hard love, slow-spoken, ancient words, difficult as a child’s first steps across a room.

My next poem will be happy, I promise myself. Then you come with your deep eyes, your tall jeans, your narrow hands, your wit, your uncanny knowledge, and your loneliness. All the flowers your father planted, all the green beans that have made it, all the world’s recorded pianos and this exhilarating day cannot change that.

I would have liked to have made a difference, to thunder my opinions loudly, so all would listen, all would understand, but all I can do is whisper, sometimes.

...

I am 62 this weekend, so will probably die soon, or get alzheimers or be rendered insane. I would love my 5 mins of fame while I can appreciate it all, please retweet, I would love to go global.. just once, one last chance to prove I existed.

IT’S WORTH PAUSING to acknowledge that the real Hillary Clinton is a charming person of moderate intellect and ability whose true talent lies in convincing college-educated people that her ambition, and by extension theirs, is a genuine expression of competence.

But this is not juice; it is sugar in water

Indeed, one could define science as reason’s attempt to compensate for our inability to perceive big numbers. If we could run at 280,000,000 meters per second, there’d be no need for a special theory of relativity: it’d be obvious to everyone that the faster we go, the heavier and squatter we get, and the faster time elapses in the rest of the world. If we could live for 70,000,000 years, there’d be no theory of evolution, and certainly no creationism: we could watch speciation and adaptation with our eyes, instead of painstakingly reconstructing events from fossils and DNA. If we could bake bread at 20,000,000 degrees Kelvin, nuclear fusion would be not the esoteric domain of physicists but ordinary household knowledge. But we can’t do any of these things, and so we have science, to deduce about the gargantuan what we, with our infinitesimal faculties, will never sense. If people fear big numbers, is it any wonder that they fear science as well and turn for solace to the comforting smallness of mysticism?

Say that the leaves are harvested when they have rotted into the mold. Call that profit. Prophesy such returns. Put your faith in the two inches of humus that will build under the trees every thousand years. Listen to carrion — put your ear close, and hear the faint chattering of the songs that are to come. Expect the end of the world. Laugh. Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful though you have considered all the facts. So long as women do not go cheap for power, please women more than men. Ask yourself: Will this satisfy a woman satisfied to bear a child? Will this disturb the sleep of a woman near to giving birth? Go with your love to the fields. Lie easy in the shade. Rest your head in her lap. Swear allegiance to what is nighest your thoughts. As soon as the generals and the politicos can predict the motions of your mind, lose it. Leave it as a sign to mark the false trail, the way you didn’t go. Be like the fox who makes more tracks than necessary, some in the wrong direction. Practice resurrection.

Home is everything. Home is not sex but also about it. Home is not a delicious meal but is also about it. Home is not a lighted bedroom but is also about it. Home is not a hot bath in the winter but it is also about it.

I love these old oily cafés around Hackney. Because you can see the smokes and steams coming out from the coffee machine or kitchen all day long. That means life is being blessed.

drugs shouldn’t taste good.

She looks at me and tilts her head and we are thinking the same thing. I am embarrassed by my happiness.

And regular stories couldn’t fool me anymore. I felt their falseness. Their rounded, finite arcs, tidy rise and fall, buttressing values, their little lessons, like solved equations. Insulting. I’d look up from a book, or away from a movie, and see the world again—its mutant patchwork, invalid formulas, no arcs—and feel akin. I started to read only nonfiction: honest history, deep science. Plain subjects, but not understood. At home in tangles of chemistry formulas, mute images of anatomy, senselessness, empty action of animals, clouds, the plates of earth shifting. The bloodless categorization of geology textbooks: metamorphic, sedimentary, igneous. The textbooks trusted me to learn the names of everything and to fix the equations. I loved them for that. I didn’t love what stories asked me to do: to join, to hope, to trust. Those books, the novels, felt like propaganda.

Work felt pure and right. I let it overtake every secret or lazy recess in my body. I wanted to see how good it could make me so I followed it all the way. It offered what I had been missing at home: structure, expectations, trust. The chance to show myself as a useful person. I discovered I loved to work. I wanted to be alone, so I wouldn’t have to talk and break the feeling, or pretend to not feel it in front of others.

And I wanted to become even less, a nothing, because I thought they could all at least have that, this one non-problem in the house, to not yell and not cry, to sweep the kitchen and pick up the thrown things and secretly restore order to whole fought-apart rooms and even to sometimes sing softly, happily, maybe for them to hear. I have kept quiet about all this my whole life.

"They were inveterate gamblers, and accomplished scroungers, who drank hair tonic in preference to post exchange beer ("horse piss"), cursed with wonderful fluency, and never went to chapel ("the Godbox") unless forced to. Many dipped snuff, smoked rank cigars, or chewed tobacco (cigarettes were for women and children). They had little use for libraries or organized athletics...they could live on jerked goat, the strong black coffee they called "boiler compound," and hash cooked in a tin hat."

"Many wore expert badges with bars for proficiency in rifle, pistol, machine gun, hand grenade, auto-rifle, mortar and bayonet. They knew their weapons and they knew their tactics. They knew they were tough and they knew they were good. There were enough of them to leaven the Division and to impart to the thousands of younger men a share of both the unique spirit which animated them and the skills they possessed. They were like a drop of dye in a gallon of water, they gave the whole division an unmistakable hue and they stamped a nickname on the division: "the Old Breed."

“I'd far rather be happy than right any day." "And are you?" "No. That's where it all falls down, of course." "Pity", said Arthur. "It sounded like rather a good lifestyle otherwise.”

He was good at this sort of affection, general and unbinding.

I had known contentment before, brief snatches of time in which I pursued solitary pleasure: skipping stones or dicing or dreaming. But in truth, it had been less a presence than an absence, a laying aside of dread: my father was not near, nor boys. I was not hungry, or tired, or sick.

This feeling was different. I found myself grinning until my cheeks hurt, my scalp prickling till I thought it might lift off my head.

God, what a good vassal

You know the best part, Frasier? It wasn't at all like I imagined it.

I learned that feeling victorious makes you victorious, and that once you lose heart or let yourself be discouraged the feeling of defeat will stay with you for the rest of your life, and you'll never get back on your feet again, especially in your own country and your own surroundings, where you're considered a runt, an eternal busboy.

I cannot hide my anger to spare you guilt, nor hurt feelings, nor answering anger; for to do so insults and trivializes all our efforts. Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change then it can be useful, since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.

Hatred is the fury of those who do not share our goals, and its object is death and destruction. Anger is a grief of distortions between peers, and its object is change.

The Difference between poetry and rhetoric is being ready to kill yourself instead of your children.

And yes, there is a hierarchy. There is a difference between painting a back fence and writing a poem, but only one of quantity. And there is, for me, no difference between writing a good poem and moving into sunlight against the body of a woman I love.

When I started to work at the Golden Prague Hotel, the boss took hold of my left ear, pulled me up, and said, You're a busboy here, so remember, you don't see anything and you don't hear anything. Repeat what I just said. So I said I wouldn't see anything and I wouldn't hear anything. Then the boss pulled me up by my right ear and said, But remember too that you've got to see everything and hear everything. Repeat it after me. I was taken aback, but I promised I would see everything and hear everything.

lack of hard rules lets errors accumulate, without any ‘global’ understanding of the drift into disaster (or at least inefficiency)

I unapologetically think a bias in favor of boring technology is a good thing, but it’s not the only factor that needs to be considered. Technology choices don’t happen in isolation. They have a scope that touches your entire team, organization, and the system that emerges from the sum total of your choices.

It’s too easy to continue doing what we’ve always done. I want to question all the constants in my programming career. The things that are already status quo are don’t need cheerleading: they’re already winning. But the weird ideas, the undersung ones, those are the ones we should be championing.

A flower is beauty. But it’s just a beauty flower - nothing more. There is nothing special around it. You are a human who can program. Maybe you are good. There is nothing special around you. You are of the same kind as I am or all the others on this planet. You need to go in the loo and you need to eat. Of course you need to sleep. After (hopefully) a long time you will die and everything you have created will be lost. Even pyramids get lost, after a long time. Do you know the names of the people who build up a pyramid? And if you do, is it important that you know? It’s not. Pyramids are there, or not. Nothing special.

Essentially, engineering is all about cooperation, collaboration, and empathy for both your colleagues and your customers. If someone told you that engineering was a field where you could get away with not dealing with people or feelings, then I’m very sorry to tell you that you have been lied to. Solitary work is something that only happens at the most junior levels, and even then it’s only possible because someone senior to you — most likely your manager — has been putting in long hours to build up the social structures in your group that let you focus on code.

In my version of you there is winter with a perfect hiding place. I don’t see any obvious rules to a river. I’m watching seagulls dizzy themselves over half a bagel thrown in the parking lot. I’m always embarassed to say I think it’s beautiful. Or hoping it is. Other birds, the more sophisticated ones, form a circle in the back of the buildings. I can’t say what they are doing or what I am doing. I am looking for someone to say I know better than this, instead unexpected wind gets blown apart against its own trophy speed. In every field I walk in, is a bigger field I’ve been.

Her head is turned sharply to the left, her line of sight passing right over the woman’s bowed head in the direction of some unseen source of light—I always thought it was a window, but who’s to say it’s not a mirror? I see that now. Face beaming or reflecting from the depths of resignation, with a small exhausted smile of utmost sweetness, an unmistakable expression of gladness toward the outer world, the sight of things exactly as they are, and expressing the sum of all knowledge regarding that world: it is still there. I gaze at her as in a mirror. This world was here before me, is now here, and will be when I am not. There is no sadness in my face, not my true face. My blanket is green, with here and there patches of brown showing through. So the grave has come into the bedroom. I am sitting up in my grave, I knew it. It comes right up to my waist; but it is not covering my face. It is still very far from covering my face.

7 A.M. first frost, the nurse who works all night / walks home, feet splayed gingerly in two directions. / Last night the old man who sells papers by day and flowers by night / sold us roses, five for a dollar. And the world / sways a little on its stem at how people have to shuffle / to survive.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

The whole he can endure; at the parts he baulks.

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event — in the living act, the undoubted deed — there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines.

The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian among other things, told me that, during the era of slavery in this country, an atrocity from which we can never fully recover, the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves. Al Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not. They could play the blues.

He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can’t drive depression clear out of a house, but they can drive it into the corners of any room where they are being played.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

The only proof he needed of the existence of God was music.

Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade. / Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. / Say autumn despite the green / in your eyes. Beauty despite / daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn / mounting in your throat. / My thrashing beneath you / like a sparrow stunned / with falling.

The body was made soft / to keep us / from loneliness. / You said that / as if the car were filling / with river water.

But now it seems possible that the truth about getting older is that there are fewer and fewer things to make fun of until finally there is nothing you are sure you will never be.

This is another way in which he is an admirable person. If he notices something is broken, he will try to fix it. He won’t just think about how unbearable it is that things keep breaking, that you can never fucking outrun entropy.

I want you to know, if you ever read this, there was a time when I would rather have had you by my side than any one of these words; I would rather have had you by my side than all the blue in the world.

But now you are talking as if love were a consolation. Simone Weil warned otherwise. “Love is not consolation,” she wrote. “It is light.”

All right then, let me try to rephrase. When I was alive, I aimed to be a student not of longing but of light.”

And suddenly his soul was filled with joy, and for a moment he had to pause to recover his breath. “The past,” he thought, “is linked to the present by an unbroken chain of events all flowing from one to the other.” And it seemed to him that he had just seen both ends of the chain, and when he touched one end the other trembled.

…

You found yourself breathing deeply, and you imagined that somewhere else, somewhere beneath the sky and above the treetops, somewhere in the open fields and the forests far from the town—somewhere there the spring was burgeoning with its own mysterious and beautiful life, full of riches and holiness, beyond the comprehension of weak, sinful man.

And for some reason you found yourself wanting to cry.

Do not wander. We are all apportioned a certain measure of stillness.

The willow branches swayed in the early-summer breeze. In a small dark room, somewhere inside Kino, a warm hand was reaching out to him. Eyes shut, he felt that hand on his, soft and substantial. He’d forgotten this, had been apart from it for far too long. Yes, I am hurt. Very, very deeply. He said this to himself. And he wept.

All the while the rain did not let up, drenching the world in a cold chill.

We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.

“Ah!” said Lee. “I’ve wanted to tell you this for a long time. I even anticipated your questions and I am well prepared. Any writing which has influenced the thinking and the lives of innumerable people is important. Now, there are many millions in their sects and churches who feel the order, ‘Do thou,’ and throw their weight into obedience. And there are millions more who feel predestination in ‘Thou shalt.’ Nothing they may do can interfere with what will be. But ‘Thou mayest’! Why, that makes a man great, that gives him stature with the gods, for in his weakness and his filth and his murder of his brother he has still the great choice. He can choose his course and fight it through and win.” Lee’s voice was a chant of triumph.

Adam said, “Do you believe that, Lee?”

“Yes, I do. Yes, I do. It is easy out of laziness, out of weakness, to throw oneself into the lap of deity, saying, ‘I couldn’t help it; the way was set.’ But think of the glory of the choice! That makes a man a man. A cat has no choice, a bee must make honey. There’s no godliness there. And do you know, those old gentlemen who were sliding gently down to death are too interested to die now?”

Adam said, “Do you mean these Chinese men believe the Old Testament?”

Lee said, “These old men believe a true story, and they know a true story when they hear it. They are critics of truth. They know that these sixteen verses are a history of humankind in any age or culture or race. They do not believe a man writes fifteen and three-quarter verses of truth and tells a lie with one verb. Confucius tells men how they should live to have good and successful lives. But this—this is a ladder to climb to the stars.” Lee’s eyes shone. “You can never lose that. It cuts the feet from under weakness and cowardliness and laziness.”

Adam said, “I don’t see how you could cook and raise the boys and take care of me and still do all this.”

“Neither do I,” said Lee. “But I take my two pipes in the afternoon, no more and no less, like the elders. And I feel that I am a man. And I feel that a man is a very important thing—maybe more important than a star. This is not theology. I have no bent toward gods. But I have a new love for that glittering instrument, the human soul. It is a lovely and unique thing in the universe. It is always attacked and never destroyed— because ‘Thou mayest.’”

It smelled of coffee—of the striving toward consciousness.

Please do not misunderstand. We had been mothers, fathers. Had been husbands of many years, men of import, who had come here, that first day, accompanied by crowds so vast and sorrowful that, surging forward to hear the oration, they had damaged fences beyond repair. Had been young wives, diverted here during childbirth, our gentle qualities stripped from us by the naked pain of that circumstance, who left behind husbands so enamored of us, so tormented by the horror of those last moments (the notion that we had gone down that awful black hole pain-sundered from ourselves) that they had never loved again. Had been bulky men, quietly content, who, in our first youth, had come to grasp our own unremarkableness and had, cheerfully (as if bemusedly accepting a heavy burden), shifted our life’s focus; if we would not be great, we would be useful; would be rich, and kind, and thereby able to effect good: smiling, hands in pockets, watching the world we had subtly improved walking past (this empty dowry filled; that education secretly funded). Had been affable, joking servants, of whom our masters had grown fond for the cheering words we managed as they launched forth on days full of import. Had been grandmothers, tolerant and frank, recipients of certain dark secrets,who, by the quality of their unjudging listening, granted tacit forgiveness, and thus let in the sun. What I mean to say is, we had been considerable. Had been loved. Not lonely, not lost, not freakish, but wise, each in his or her own way. Our departures caused pain. Those who had loved us sat upon their beds, heads in hand; lowered their faces to tabletops, making animal noises. We had been loved, I say, and remembering us, even many years later, people would smile, briefly gladdened at the memory.

With great and solemn portent, my teacher announced she would tell us something that her teacher had told her, and that her teacher’s teacher had told him, and so on, back to Yeats: The thing to remember is that no one ever finds out that you don’t know what you’re doing.

As a writer, I have mistaken how to use words. I write too much. I write like some people talk to fill silence. When I write, I am trying through the movement of my fingers to reach my head. I’m trying to build a word ladder up to my brain. Eventually these words help me come to an idea, and then I rewrite and rewrite and rewrite what I’d already written (when I had no idea what I was writing about) until the path of thinking, in retrospect, feels immediate. What’s on the page appears to have busted out of my head and traveled down my arms and through my fingers and my keyboard and coalesced on the screen. But it didn’t happen like that; it never happens like that.

And though your joined personal histories are supposed to save you from misunderstandings, they usually cause you to understand all too well what is meant.

What can you expect from a pyre but a pyre?

The Soviets set out to find evidence that did not exist and, when they failed to find it, assumed this must be proof of how well that evidence had been hidden.

The men stood and watched the spectacle, eyes bright. When the geese had all departed, they saw the reason they had left; a herd of giant deer had come to the lake to drink. The stags had huge racks of antlers. They stared across the water at the men, vigilant but undeterred. For a moment, all was still. In the end the giant deer stepped away. Reality awoke again. “All sentient beings,” said I-Chin, who had been muttering his Buddhist sutras all along. Kheim normally had no time for such claptrap, but now, as the day continued, and they hiked over the hills on their hunt, seeing great numbers of peaceful beaver, quail, rabbits, foxes, seagulls and crows, ordinary deer, a bear and two cubs, a slinky long-tailed gray hunting creature, like a fox crossed with a squirrel—on and on—simply a whole country of animals, living together under a silent blue sky—nothing disturbed, the land flourishing on its own, the people there just a small part of it—Kheim began to feel odd. He realized that he had taken China for reality itself. Taiwan and the Mindanaos and the other islands he had seen were like scraps of land, leftovers; China had seemed to him the world. And China meant people. Built up, cultivated, parceled off ha by ha, it was so completely a human world that Kheim had never considered that there might once have been a natural world different to it. But here was natural land, right before his eyes, full as could be with animals of every kind, and obviously very much bigger than Taiwan; bigger than China; bigger than the world he had known before. “Where on Earth are we?” he said to I-Chin. I-Chin said, “We have found the source of the peach-blossom stream.”

Language is what eases the pain of living with other people, language is what makes the wounds come open again. I have heard that anthropologists prize those moments when a word or bit of language opens like a keyhole into another person, a whole alien world roars past in some unarranged phrase. You remember Proust so appalled when Albertine lets fall “get her pot broken.” Or you hear a Berliner say “squat town”—and suddenly see sunset, winter, lovers cooking eggs in a grimy kitchen with the windows steaming up, river runs coldly by, little cats go clicking over the snow. You can fill your district notebook with these jottings, exciting as the unwary use of a kinship term.

I asked her whether she would mind telling me about the incident, and her face took on a look of alarm. She put her hands to her throat, where two blue veins stood out.

‘Bloke jumped out of a bush,’ she squawked. ‘Tried to strangle me.’

She hoped I would understand, she added, but despite what she’d said earlier she was in fact trying not to talk about it any more. She was trying her very best to sum it up. Let’s just say that drama became something real to me that day, she said. It ceased to be theoretical, was no longer an internal structure in which she could hide and look out at the world. In a sense, her work had jumped out of a bush and attacked her.

Zembla, a distant northern land.

We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students).

Pale Fire is a Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself novel. It consists of a 999-line poem of four cantos in heroic couplets together with an editor’s preface, notes, index, and proof-corrections. When the separate parts are assembled, according to the manufacturer’s directions, and fitted together with the help of clues and cross-references, which must be hunted down as in a paper-chase, a novel on several levels is revealed, and these “levels” are not the customary “levels of meaning” of modernist criticism but planes in a fictive space, rather like those houses of memory in medieval mnemonic science, where words, facts, and numbers were stored till wanted in various rooms and attics, or like the Houses of astrology into which the heavens are divided.

If she asks you, you will tell her what you know. You do not lie. But do not say he was murdered or he was killed. Yes, I know that he was, but that is not what you say. You say that he died; that is the part that you saw and that you know. When she asks if he felt any pain, you must be very careful. If he did not, you assure her quickly. If he did, you do not lie. But his pain is over now. Do not ever say he was lucky that he did not feel pain. He was not lucky. She is not lucky. Don’t make that face. The depth of the stupidity of the things you will say sometimes is unimaginable.

The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true. He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent with what he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s development, or in the general history of thought, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been misunderstood (specially by the learned man’s own colleagues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the ‘present state of the question’. To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge—to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or your behaviour—this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded.

We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain—not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.

But flippancy is the best of all. In the first place it is very economical. Only a clever human can make a real Joke about virtue, or indeed about anything else; any of them can be trained to talk as if virtue were funny. Among flippant people the Joke is always assumed to have been made. No one actually makes it; but every serious subject is discussed in a manner which implies that they have already found a ridiculous side to it. If prolonged, the habit of Flippancy builds up around a man the finest armour-plating against the Enemy that I know, and it is quite free from the dangers inherent in the other sources of laughter. It is a thousand miles away from joy: it deadens, instead of sharpening, the intellect; and it excites no affection between those who practise it.

A good line graph is a fusion of right and left brain, of literacy and numeracy. Just numbers alone aren’t enough to explain the truth, but accurate numbers, represented truthfully, are a check on our anecdotal excesses, confirmation biases, tribal affiliations.

Nowadays, companies hang flat screen TVs hanging on the walls, all them running 24/7 to display a variety of charts. Most everyone ignores them. The spirit is right, to be transparent all the time, but the understanding of human nature is not. We ignore things that are shown to us all the time. However, if once a month, a huge packet of charts dropped on your desk, with a cover letter summarizing the results, and if the CEO and your peers received the same package the same day, and that piece of work included charts on how your part of the business was running, you damn well paid attention, like any person turning to the index of a book on their company to see if they were mentioned. Ritual matters.

Many things which appear of little imp⟨ortance in⟩ themselves and at the beginning, may have ⟨great and⟩ durable consequences from their having be⟨en establis⟩hed at the commencement of a new general ⟨Govern⟩ment. It will be much easier to comme⟨nce the adm⟩inistration, upon a well adjusted system ⟨built on⟩ tenable grounds, than to correct errors or alter inconveniences after they shall have been confirmed by habit. The President in all matters of business & etiquette, can have no object but to demean himself in his public character, in such a manner as to maintain the dignity of Office, without subjecting himself to the imputation of superciliousness or unnecessary reserve. Under these impressions, he asks for your candid and undisguised opinions.

I think it’s one of the most beautiful pieces of jazz ever composed. Listening to it is like watching snow through a window. The room is warm, something is roasting in the oven, and outside the flakes are falling faintly through the universe and upon the trees, the hedges, the rain gutters, the telephone poles, and the rooftops of a thousand apartment buildings in a very big city. This is where you want to be forever. This is Vince Guaraldi’s “Christmas Time Is Here.” It opens with a trembling bass, like someone coming out of the cold, stamping their feet, brushing the snow off their shoulders, hanging up their winter coat, rubbing and blowing on numb fingers, and entering the living room where there is a window for watching the flakes falling faintly upon all the buildings of the living.

I drove away from the house of Mable Jones thinking of all of this. I drove away, as always, thinking of you. I do not belive that we can stop them, Samori, because they must ultimately stop themselves. And still I urge you to struggle. Struggle for the memory of your ancestors. Struggle for wisdom. Struggle for the warmth of The Mecca. Struggle for your grandmother and grandfather, for your name. But do not struggle for the Dreamers. Hope for them. Pray for them, if you are so moved. But do not pin your struggle on their conversion. The Dreamers will have to learn to struggle themselves, to understand that the field for their Dream, the stage where they have painted themselves white, is the deathbed of us all. The Dream is the same habit that endangers the planet, the same habit that sees our bodies stowed away in prisons and ghettos. I saw these ghettos driving back from Dr. Jones’s home. They were the same ghettos I had seen in Chicago all those years ago, the same ghettos where my mother was raised, where my father was raised. Through the windshield I saw the marks of the ghettos—the abundance of beauty shops, churches, liquor stores, and crumbling houses—and I felt the old fear. Through the windshield I saw the rain coming down in sheets.

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises. That thing you had to force yourself to do—the actual act of writing—turns out to be the best part. It’s like discovering that while you thought you needed the tea ceremony for the caffeine, what you really needed was the tea ceremony. The act of writing turns out to be its own reward.

The stories Chance tells, they all suggest he understands his unique position, his purpose, and perhaps even his duty. But even if he’s seen and done a lot, all roads lead back home. It’s what Jeremih meant on “Summer Friends”: “Even when I change, a nigga never changed up / I always bring my friends, my friends, my friends, my friends up.” This album isn’t just the story of Chance, it’s the story of his people, a love letter to his neighborhood. He knows he’s blessed, so much so he said it twice. But he also knows he’s no more special than the people he grew up around; he simply is the one who lived to tell everyone’s story.

War is conducted with a fury that requires abstraction—that turns a planeful of peaceful passengers, children included, into a missile the faceless enemy deserves.

An ad that pretends to be art is—at absolute best—like somebody who smiles warmly at you only because he wants something from you. This is dishonest, but what’s sinister is the cumulative effect that such dishonesty has on us: since it offers a perfect facsimile or simulacrum of goodwill without goodwill’s real spirit, it messes with our heads and eventually starts upping our defenses even in cases of genuine smiles and real art and true goodwill. It makes us feel confused and lonely and impotent and angry and scared. It causes despair.

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time. It is dreadful. But since it’s my own choices that’ll lock me in, it seems unavoidable—if I want to be any kind of grownup, I have to make choices and regret foreclosures and try to live with them.

It is a luxury to see some violence as terror and other violence as necessary.

First leave nothing to the imagination, and then leave everything to the imagination.

This is the difficult work: convincing a room full of people to set their sadness aside and, for a night, bring out whatever joy remains underneath—in a world where there is so much grief to be had, leading the people to water and letting them drink from your cupped hands.

This is about hope, sure, but not in the way that it is often packaged as an antithesis to that which is burning.

Meaning is like music; it catches and is carried. It returns. Refrains, phrases, the names of passing boats. Stuck in my head, it’s stuck in my head. The way stories fasten themselves to words, words fasten themselves to vulnerable rhythms, impressionable tunes. Ann is skilled in the archaeology of carried music. It holds on like fear, like love.

He knows the name of the moment to come, like the baby knew the name of the crow. To die is to simply remember how to die.

“What if the cat wants in when we’re gone?” he asks. There is no cat, like there is no raven, like there is no one-eyed dog. But she knows the right answer.

“You carved him a door.”

“Where?”

“Everywhere.”

Be patient, don’t give up, and always be learning. You can turn even the most crappy situation into valuable lessons. Teach them to others. Be happy with what you have yet always strive to improve things. Don’t let people flatter you into playing their games. When things get weird, keep a log. Love and respect good people. Learn to keep the assholes at a distance. Don’t get hung-up on the past. Be nice to people, even those trying to hurt you. Speak up when things are bad, and tell the truth. Trust your emotions yet check where they come from. Don’t be afraid of taking risks, and learn to identify and manage risks. Solve one problem at a time. Be generous. Teach others whenever you can. Remember Sturgeon’s Law.

As a minority, no sooner do you learn to polish and cherish one chip on your shoulder than it’s taken off you and swapped for another. The jewellery of your struggles is forever on loan.

I did not know then that this is what life is - just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.

We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us.

Now, I / demand a love that is stupid and beautiful / like a pilot turning off her engines mid-flight / to listen for rain on wings.

Now the chief and, though we betray our personal predilection by saying so, the most monstrous characteristic of our time is that the methods of manufacture which we employ and of which we are proud are such as make it impossible for the ordinary workman to be an artist, that is to say a responsible workman, a man responsible not merely for doing what he is told but responsible also for the intellectual quality of what his deeds effect

The abnormality of our time, that which makes it contrary to nature, is its deliberate and stated determination to make the working life of men & the product of their working hours mechanically perfect, and to relegate all the humanities, all that is of its nature humane, to their spare time, to the time when they are not at work.

Romance is a grotto of eager stones / anticipating light, or a girl whose teeth / you can always see.

The easiest response to all this, to the yelling and the lying and the pain, the natural response, is apathy. To lie down in a pastel heap of heavy blankets and sleep this whole thing away like Rip Van Winkle. But you remember what happens to Rip Van Winkle. He comes home to find his house in ruins. So we don’t get to sleep. We have to fight to keep our eyes open, and we have to take small victories, and we have to stay engaged in making society function.

My dream for the web is for it to feel like big city. A place where you rub elbows with people who are not like you. Somewhere a little bit scary, a little chaotic, full of everything you can imagine and a lot of things that you can’t. A place where there’s room for chain stores, room for entertainment conglomerates, but also room for people to be themselves, to create their own spaces, and to learn from one another.

Like a lot of nerdy kids of my generation, I spent half adolescence at the library, or at home reading library books. Along with schoolbooks and crappy 90’s TV, the Glenview Public Library was my window on the world.

I never reflected on why this unremarkable suburban library existed, who funded it, where its values had come from, or how long it would be around. It was as immutable a part of the world to me as Lake Michigan.

But it taught me that like everyone else, I had a right to learn and was welcome. That I could ask questions, and learn how to find my way to the answers. It taught me the importance of being quiet in public places.

I find it helpful to think of algorithms as a dim-witted but extremely industrious graduate student, whom you don’t fully trust. You want a concordance made? An index? You want them to go through ten million photos and find every picture of a horse? Perfect.

You want them to draw conclusions on gender based on word use patterns? Or infer social relationships from census data? Now you need some adult supervision in the room.

Recently, a friend observed that watching this show, often enough, we do not laugh anymore. I supposed that was right, and we wondered why, agreeing that its humor had not diminished with age. “It’s like being with an old friend,” I ventured. “With whom you can be comfortable in silence.”

“No,” he said, making a face. It wasn’t like that at all.

“Well, what then?” I said. “It’s like something.”

“Yes,” he said. “Do you know what it’s like? It’s something like being home.”

I feel: the grass is sad everywhere, but at least we can kiss?

“It’s not disillusion, sir. I see now, though I hadn’t considered the matter before, that there are two different ways of writing history: one is to persuade men to virtue and the other is to compel men to truth. The first is Livy’s way and the other is yours: and perhaps they are not irreconcilable.”

You don’t realize how much of your sense of self is bound up in how you use your time until you have a lot of it. An important part of myself had been propped up not on a title or a vocation but on a hundred quiet daily rites from which I was now an apostate: Slack chats, email exchanges, mid-afternoon coffees, bags of Haribo, glasses of warm vodka drunk after work at a friend’s desk

Every time I’m in an airport, I think I should drastically change my life: Kill the kid stuff, start to act my numbers, set fire to the clutter and creep below the radar like an escaped canine sneaking along the fence line. I’d be cable-knitted to the hilt, beautiful beyond buying, believe in the maker and fix my problems with prayer and property. Then, I think of you, home with the dog, the field full of purple pop-ups– we’re small and flawed, but I want to be who I am, going where I’m going, all over again.

This question—“Does it hold up?”—permeates our cultural discourse these days. I don’t say that judgmentally. It’s a question we ask ourselves and each other because we’re self-conscious. En route to a screening of When Harry Met Sally last Valentine’s Day, an old friend told me she thought the gender politics of the movie aged horribly. To watch it made her uncomfortable and sad. It didn’t hold up. I felt my cheeks flush with anger. Of course it didn’t hold up. It wasn’t made to hold up. It was made as it was, with care and concern and whip-smart jokes.

He feels the truth: the thing that has left his life has left irrevocably; no search would recover it. No flight would reach it. It was here, beneath the town, in these smells and these voices, forever behind him. The fullness ends when we give Nature her ransom, when we make children for her. Then she is through with us, and we become, first inside, and then outside, junk.

The past was a vine hanging on by just these five tendrils and it tore away easily, leaving her clean and blue and blank.

Everybody who tells you how to act has whiskey on their breath.

Laws aren’t ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.

So, I’ll pick up a book, put it down. Someone says, “How long did it take you to read that book?” And I’ll say, “Fifty-two years,” because I’ve been reading since I was three, and that’s the correct answer. People don’t get that. It took me 52 years to read that book. So I’m not a fast reader. I’m a very, very slow reader. You’re just mis-measuring the unit if you think I read something quickly.

All labor has dignity.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

Make sure that by the time the fisherman returns you are gone.

She was the first “nice” girl he had ever known. In various unrevealed capacities he had come in contact with such people, but always with indiscernible barbed wire between. He found her excitingly desirable. He went to her house, at first with other officers from Camp Taylor, then alone. It amazed him — he had never been in such a beautiful house before, but what gave it an air of breathless intensity, was that Daisy lived there — it was as casual a thing to her as his tent out at camp was to him. There was a ripe mystery about it, a hint of bedrooms up-stairs more beautiful and cool than other bedrooms, of gay and radiant activities taking place through its corridors, and of romances that were not musty and laid away already in lavender but fresh and breathing and redolent of this year’s shining motor-cars and of dances whose flowers were scarcely withered.

I want to have married a man who wanted to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much that he marked it up like a book, underlining, highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.

To do this requires you to divorce process from outcome. You can be right for the wrong reasons. In our business, you’re often lionized for it. You can be wrong for the right reasons. This may well prove to be Joel Embiid.

There has been much criticism of our approach. There will be more. A competitive league like the NBA necessitates a zig while our competitors comfortably zag. We often chose not to defend ourselves against much of the criticism, largely in an effort to stay true to the ideal of having the longest view in the room. To attempt to convince others that our actions are just will serve to paint us in a different light among some of our competitors as progressives worth emulating, versus adversaries worthy of their disdain. Call me old-fashioned, but sometimes the optimal place for your light is hiding directly under a bushel.

The majority of VCs deserve neither criticism or praise, but the majority want praise without exposure to criticism.

There are two fundamental rules of taxes:

It is always better to have more money than less money. It is always better to die later than sooner.

SEA BEARS FOAM, SLEEP BEARS DREAMS. BOTH END IN THE SAME WAY CRASSSH!

Thinking about what I should say to you made me think about what we learn in college; and what we unlearn in college; and then how we learn to unlearn what we learned in college and relearn what we unlearned in college, and so on. And I thought how I have learned, more or less well, three languages, all of them English; and how one of these languages is the one I went to college to learn …

It is a language always on the verge of silence and often on the verge of song.

It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be. One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself–that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving.

In all jazz, and especially the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defenselessly fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been “down the line,” as the song puts it, know what this music is about. White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality, and do not any longer understand it. The word “sensual” is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.

I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.

Get better every day through fast, frequent improvements. Optimize for performance. Features are the enemy. Design is code/code is design. Assume all users are smart. Constrain scope, except when you shouldn’t. Minimalism. Ship.

with the animals dying around us our lost feelings we are saying thank you with the forests falling faster than the minutes of our lives we are saying thank you with the words going out like cells of a brain with the cities growing over us we are saying thank you faster and faster with nobody listening we are saying thank you we are saying thank you and waving dark though it is

Poetry is the only art form where the space for breath is built right in.

A garden is not an object but a process.

Take a shower. Use nice-smelling soap. Put on a clean, soft bathrobe. I suggest slipper socks as well - the ones with little rubber dots on the bottom. Make another breakfast Maybe a poached egg, or slice of quiche. Brew a fresh pot of tea. Read the news or twitter or the next chapter in a book.

Oh, I thought, for the first time: children are pregnant with themselves.

It’s true what they say, that a baby gives you a reason to live. But also, a baby is a reason that it is not permissible to die. There are days when this does not feel good.

Renouncing things is less difficult than people believe: it’s all a matter of getting started. Once you’ve succeeded in dispensing with something you thought essential, you realize you can also do without something else, then without many other things.

One reads alone, even in another’s presence.

The past is like a tapeworm, constantly growing, which I carry curled up inside me and I can be sure that even in this tiny, insignificant episode there is implicit everything I have experienced, all the past, the multiple pasts I have tried in vain to leave behind me.

It’s not easy: they teach us to read as children, and for the rest of our lives we remain the slaves of all the written stuff they fling in front of us. I may have had to make some effort myself, at first, to learn not to read, but now it comes quite naturally to me. The secret is not refusing to look at the written words. On the contrary, you must look at them, intensely, until they disappear.

Make it a rule never to rise from the table without an unsatisfied longing for just one little thing more.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap / Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge / Through living roots awaken in my head. / But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb / The squat pen rests. / I’ll dig with it.

Like the starlight that travels millions of years before we see it, the four little boys stand in their underpants at Coney Island on an August day in 1978, and it is only now, in a found photograph, that we behold them.

The ocean has not quite left their hair. Four decades later, they are still flexing their muscles, still just about 10-going-on-11.

oh god it’s wonderful / to get out of bed / and drink too much coffee / and smoke too many cigarettes / and love you so much

A book I read when I was young recommended an easy way to find caterpillars to rear: you simply find some fresh caterpillar droppings, look up, and there’s your caterpillar.

We know Lilith ate / the bones of her enemies. We know / a bitch learns to love her own ghost.

“It’s hard not to become self-satisfied,” he said, “with so much self-satisfaction around you.”

You can’t be dead if you have a sequel coming.

You see, Wally, the trouble with always being active and doing things is that it’s quite possible to do all sorts of things and at the same time be completely dead inside. I mean, you’re doing all these things, but are you doing them because you really feel an impulse to do them, or are you doing them mechanically, as we were saying before? Because I do believe that if you’re just living mechanically, then you have to change your life.

You do not have to be good. / You do not have to walk on your knees / For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. / You only have to let the soft animal of your body / love what it loves.

On its own, when you see one person slip, you automatically assume that person slipped, was clumsy or not playing attention. But when you look at the aggregate, you realize that the failure isn’t on the individual at all, rather the structures that cause certain people to fail with almost no fault of their own. And yet, without this data, they will very quickly ascribe the mistake to themselves. 


It difficult to explain to someone that the reason they live their life the way they do because of the structures built to help them live that way. But imagine, instead of a stupid mislaid step, the faulty structure is a punitive late policy on a credit card, or a bank that has a minimum balance fee and very quickly the maintenance of the status-quo is laid bare. 


A good watch celebrates time.

“I am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than a season.”

When the queen was newly crowned we wore pink hats and the city was small; when she died we wore no hats and the city was thriving.

I keep wondering why we don’t double down on calendars. Why don’t we put our documents inside calendar entries? Why don’t our emails pop up inside the calendar, at the time they wer sent? Why is there any form of communications software that isn’t, at its essence, a calendar? Calendars are, I believe, the single greatest wasted opportunity in all of software.

Besides privacy, another thing people are said to luxuriate in is hot water – a bath, a shower, a hot springs. Part of this is the pleasure of not having to expend energy maintaining temperature homeostasis. The pleasure of privacy is similar: freedom from having to expend cognitive energy in modeling others and conforming one’s behavior to the standards of public self-presentation, in order to maintain status homeostasis. Privacy is a form of rest.

opsec will get you through times of no crypto better than crypto will get you through times of no opsec.

Knowing the odds, Battier can pursue an inherently uncertain strategy with total certainty. He can devote himself to a process and disregard the outcome of any given encounter. This is critical because in basketball, as in everything else, luck plays a role, and Battier cannot afford to let it distract him.

Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers. On defense, although he routinely guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers, he significantly ­reduces their shooting percentages. At the same time he somehow improves the defensive efficiency of his teammates — probably, Morey surmises, by helping them out in all sorts of subtle ways. “I call him Lego,” Morey says. “When he’s on the court, all the pieces start to fit together. And everything that leads to winning that you can get to through intellect instead of innate ability, Shane excels in. I’ll bet he’s in the hundredth percentile of every category.”

I am sorry / to hold you again / for so long / I am in the mood / to be forgotten.

Under the pavement, pavement. Hoaxes, failures, porches, archaeological strata spread out on a continuous thin plane; softness and speed, echoes, spores, tropes, fonts; not identity but incident and the accumulation of air miles; unmarked solitude absorbing time, bloating to become an environment, indexical euphorias, the unraveling of laughter; a brief history of escalators; memory manifest, brindled, loosening; a crumpling of automotive glass; the pornographic, the wrapped; Helvetica’s black dust: All doctrine is foreign to us. Forget the journals, conferences, salons, textbooks and media of dissemination. We say thought’s object is not knowledge but living. We do not like it elsewhere.

I don’t think people come to a Frightened Rabbit show to feel sad, and I don’t think they feel sad at the show. That struck me quite early on. There is a release there. Private little moments of excitement for all of us in the band become this outpouring of celebratory, “we’re all fucked, but it’s okay!” sort of thing. I really enjoy that feeling. I guess that’s what life has come to mean to me: It’s not ever quite right, but that’s okay.

“My only closing Janos thoughts are that he’s awesome,” Karalis says. “I just want Janos to exist in this plane where we know it’s kind of a joke, but we’re all going to pretend it’s not, and this is just the perfect zone for Janos. I just hope this stays. I don’t want Janos to be revealed.

“I just want Janos to be this forever.”

The more complicated a theory is, the more ways there are for it to go wrong.

Voters, activists, and political leaders of the present day are in the position of medieval doctors. They hold simple, prescientific theories about the workings of society and the causes of social problems, from which they derive a variety of remedies–almost all of which prove either ineffectual or harmful. Society is a complex mechanism whose repair, if possible at all, would require a precise and detailed understanding of a kind that no one today possesses. Unsatisfying as it may seem, the wisest course for political agents is often simply to stop trying to solve society’s problems.

For the Vikings, this was the essence of war: it’s a mystery that comes out of nowhere and grows for reasons nobody can control, until it shakes the whole world apart.

Maybe buying in is really the punk rock choice.

There’s no such thing as bad guys and good guys! We’re all just guys! Who do good stuff, sometimes. And bad stuff, sometimes. And all we can do is try to do less bad stuff and more good stuff. But you’re never going to be good! Because you’re not bad! So you need to stop using that as an excuse.

It gets easier. Every day it gets a little easier. But you got to do it every day. That’s the hard part. But it does get easier.

I just wanted to tell you… I know. I know you wanna be happy, but you won’t be, and… I’m sorry. It’s not just you, you know. Your father and I, we, well… You come by it, honestly, the ugliness inside you. You were born broken. That’s your birthright. And now you can fill your life with projects–your books, and your girlfriends, and your little movies–but that won’t make you whole. You’re BoJack Horseman. There’s no cure for that.

If you’re making a procedural argument, your soul already knows you’ve lost.

IT IS IN YOUR SELF-INTEREST TO FIND A WAY TO BE VERY TENDER

“I’m not scared of dying, I’m scared of breaking my mother’s heart”

fandom is infrastructure, a million people clapping for tinkerbell, an attempt to take an unstable, ephemeral value and through repetition and manipulation make it solid enough to look at. you don’t know why you like football, or a celebrity, or a tv show, but when you wear your jersey or look at your autograph or buy the box set of dvd’s you feel a little bit, inexplicably, like this value you can’t articulate is more real. when you draw art or write stories about the thing you’re a fan of, you flesh the value out, or refine it, and this stabilizes it as well

Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event.

This reminds me of the old saying about cars, that Americans buy horsepower, but drive torque.

In computers, it seems to me that we buy throughput, but feel latency.

When nothing becomes something, it defies death. It puts to rest our fear that all that awaits us is a void. This is the essential appeal of social media, that each of the internet’s billion hashtags is a tiny cri de coeur, a yooooooooooooo into a mirror world that we cannot touch, a door slamming in a draftless room.

In a 2011 paper on the medical effects of scurvy, author Jason C. Anthony offers a remarkable detail about human bodies and the long-term presence of wounds. “Without vitamin C,” Anthony writes, “we cannot produce collagen, an essential component of bones, cartilage, tendons and other connective tissues. Collagen binds our wounds, but that binding is replaced continually throughout our lives. Thus in advanced scurvy”—reached when the body has gone too long without vitamin C—“old wounds long thought healed will magically, painfully reappear.”

In a sense, there is no such thing as healing. From paper cuts to surgical scars, our bodies are mere catalogs of wounds: imperfectly locked doors quietly waiting, sooner or later, to spring back open.

Our daily lives are structured by screens and a rational approach to instability, without any semblance of meaning. We shrug off threats like climate change and nuclear war. We check our phone a combined 8 billion times a day. And with rates of depression & anxiety higher than ever before, people are searching for new ways to bond, new ways to interface, new ways to build collectivity.

Astrology puts our temporary bodies in context with the universe’s vastness, allowing irrationality to invade our techno-rationalist ways of living. It adds mystery and madness to an increasingly clinical and confusing world, situating us in the vast cosmos, among the planets and stars.

The water is clear all the way down. Nothing ever polished it. That is the way it is.

Audrey Rouget: What Jane Austen novels have you read?

Tom Townsend: None. I don’t read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists’ ideas as well as the critics’ thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it’s all just made up by the author.

If the system can be gamed, well then, our ability to game the system has become the new test of merit.

We all go way back and I owe you from the thing with the guy in the place.

“Nothing was learned from this,” he says. “A culture not willing to think hard and test itself does not augur well for the future.” The exercise, he says, was rigged almost from the outset.

We are powered by fear and guile and a contact high and it feels amazing.

I have pulled tinsel from your hair and called it mistletoe, led you into the woods wearing cheap underwear and handed you the switchblade from my boot. I worshiped the myth I made of you, but I’m off my knees now. I want your hands to become language and make me offer you one thigh at a time. Let it sting loud and sweetly. Let bruise be proof. Let the smell of your hands.

If research on the 2 sigma problem yields practival methods, it would be an educational contribution of the greatest magnitude. It would change popular notions about human potential and have significant effects on what the schools can and should dow ith the educational years each society requires of its young people.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, And shares our bed and eats at our own table.

Some people will say that words like scum and rotten are wrong for Objective Journalism – which is true, but they miss the point. It was the built-in blind spots of the Objective rules and dogma that allowed Nixon to slither into the White House in the first place. He looked so good on paper that you could almost vote for him sight unseen. He seemed so all-American, so much like Horatio Alger, that he was able to slip through the cracks of Objective Journalism. You had to get Subjective to see Nixon clearly, and the shock of recognition was often painful.

But how shall we educate men to goodness, to a sense of one another, to a love of the truth? And more urgently, how shall we do this in a bad time?

IT’S CHRISTMASTIME; I’m older, I’m elsewhere. On the train to work, I swipe through social media and hit on a post from the start-up’s holiday party, which has its own hashtag. The photograph is of two former teammates, both of them smiling broadly, their teeth as white as I remember. “So grateful to be part of such an amazing team,” the caption reads, and I tap through. The hashtag unleashes a stream of photographs featuring people I’ve never met — beautiful people, the kind of people who look good in athleisure. They look well rested. They look relaxed and happy. They look nothing like me. There’s a photograph of what can only be the pre-dinner floor show: an acrobat in a leotard kneeling on a pedestal, her legs contorted, her feet grasping a bow and arrow, poised to release. Her target is a stuffed heart, printed with the company logo. I scroll past animated photo-booth GIFs of strangers, kissing and mugging for the camera, and I recognize their pride, I empathize with their sense of accomplishment — this was one hell of a year, and they have won. I feel gently ill, a callback to the childhood nausea of being left out.

What is it like to be fun? What is it like to feel like you’ve earned this?

We get ourselves out of the office and into a bar. We have more in common than our grievances, but we kick off by speculating about our job security, complaining about the bureaucratic double-downs, casting blame for blocks and poor product decisions. We talk about our IPO like it’s the deus ex machina coming down from on high to save us — like it’s an inevitability, like our stock options will lift us out of our existential dread, away from the collective anxiety that ebbs and flows. Realistically, we know it could be years before an IPO, if there’s an IPO at all; we know in our hearts that money is a salve, not a solution. Still, we are hopeful. We reassure ourselves and one another that this is just a phase; every start-up has its growing pains. Eventually we are drunk enough to change the subject, to remember our more private selves. The people we are on weekends, the people we were for years.

With a sufficient number of users of an API, it does not matter what you promise in the contract: all observable behaviors of your system will be depended on by somebody.

Happiness writes white: it doesn’t show up on the page.

No, I was not busy when you came! I was not preparing to be busy. That’s the armor everyone put on to pretend they had a purpose in the world.

When I’m back, I want a body like a slash of lightning.

But research still confirms what this Court suggested over a century ago: Years on end of near-total isolation exacts a terrible price.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prison.

Writing anything is a treason of sorts. Even the cold recitation of facts is never the thing itself. And the events described are somehow diminished in the telling. A perfect bowl of bouillabaisse, that first, all-important oyster, plucked from the Bassin d’Arcachon, both are made cheaper, less distinct in my memory, once I’ve written about them. Whether I missed a few other things, or described them inadaquately, like the adventures of the Amazing Steven Tempel, or my Day in the Life, are less important. Our movements through time and space seem somehow trivial compared to a heap of boiled meat in broth, the smell of saffron, garlic, fishbones and Pernod.

Assume the worst. About everybody. But don’t let this poisoned outlook affect your job performance. Let it all roll off your back. Ignore it. Be amused by what you see and suspect. Just because someone you work with is a miserable, treacherous, self-serving, capricious and corrupt asshole shouldn’t prevent you from enjoying their company, working with them or finding them entertaining.

People silently struggle from all kinds of terrible things. They suffer from depression, ambition, substance abuse, and pretension. They suffer from family tragedy, Ivy-League educations, and self-loathing. They suffer from failing marriages, physical pain, and publishing. The good thing about politeness is that you can treat these people exactly the same. And then wait to see what happens. You don’t have to have an opinion. You don’t need to make a judgment. I know that doesn’t sound like liberation, because we live and work in an opinion-based economy. But it is. Not having an opinion means not having an obligation. And not being obligated is one of the sweetest of life’s riches.

Baking time depends on the fire and your patience.

I myself am probably too washed to pinpoint the moment that “washed”—an existential description that has become ubiquitous in the past few years, as the American empire ebbs and exhaustion sets in—first entered the culture. It’s not quite “washed up,” with its connotations of lounge singers in Vegas reflecting on their glory days. It’s more about that transitive moment: There you are in the train station of life, waving goodbye to your edge and your youth as they depart. You are Eli Manning, and you are no longer a plausible NFL starter in the eyes of some, but you are not yet ready to go to the bench. You haven’t been to that particular new restaurant yet, but you’ve heard it’s nice.

say: that boy he look like a hollowed-out grandfather clock. he look like a million-dollar god with a two-cent heaven. like all it takes is one kiss & before morning, you could scatter his whole mind across a field.

an apartment filled with music, hiss of damp clothes drying on the radiator, a prayer made with a record’s broken needle to become beaming and undone.

At first, the boy was made very nervous by the thought that Mister Rogers was visiting him. He was so nervous, in fact, that when Mister Rogers did visit, he got mad at himself and began hating himself and hitting himself, and his mother had to take him to another room and talk to him. Mister Rogers didn’t leave, though. He wanted something from the boy, and Mister Rogers never leaves when he wants something from somebody. He just waited patiently, and when the boy came back, Mister Rogers talked to him, and then he made his request. He said, “I would like you to do something for me. Would you do something for me?” On his computer, the boy answered yes, of course, he would do anything for Mister Rogers, so then Mister Rogers said, “I would like you to pray for me. Will you pray for me?” And now the boy didn’t know how to respond. He was thunderstruck. Thunderstruck means that you can’t talk, because something has happened that’s as sudden and as miraculous and maybe as scary as a bolt of lightning, and all you can do is listen to the rumble. The boy was thunderstruck because nobody had ever asked him for something like that, ever. The boy had always been prayed for. The boy had always been the object of prayer, and now he was being asked to pray for Mister Rogers, and although at first he didn’t know if he could do it, he said he would, he said he’d try, and ever since then he keeps Mister Rogers in his prayers and doesn’t talk about wanting to die anymore, because he figures Mister Rogers is close to God, and if Mister Rogers likes him, that must mean God likes him, too.

As for Mister Rogers himself…well, he doesn’t look at the story in the same way that the boy did or that I did. In fact, when Mister Rogers first told me the story, I complimented him on being so smart—for knowing that asking the boy for his prayers would make the boy feel better about himself—and Mister Rogers responded by looking at me at first with puzzlement and then with surprise. “Oh, heavens no, Tom! I didn’t ask him for his prayers for him; I asked for me. I asked him because I think that anyone who has gone through challenges like that must be very close to God. I asked him because I wanted his intercession.”

Who was it who said, uh, “even if life is forever, each moment of it is a miracle?” I think that’s just something we tell ourselves. We’re just ordinary and forever, I think. There’s a leveling out that happens if you live forever and ever without anything to lose.

My throat, it still tastes like house fire and salt water

love is a burning house we built from scratch. love keeps us busy while the smoke clears.

These are all toys from my childhood. They’re my fond memories of growing up here. We used to play in this ruin before it got infested by monsters. As a child, I thought every moment would last forever. But as time went by, I grew up, and now I’m an adult. I only have a week left before I go away to a faraway land to work. That means I only have one week left of my childhood. To tell you the truth… I’m scared to death. Would I be able to adapt to an unknown place? Moreover, would I be able to stay true to who I am? I’m scared I won’t be myself anymore. That’s why I want to take with me the memories of who I am now, so I won’t forget.

A good historian can find precedent for everything. But an even better historian knows when these precedents are but curiosities that cloud the big picture.

We pray for ridiculous things, we humans. And so often are indulged.

It is a rugged land, but good at raising children.

I disapprove of crying during dinner. Dawn will soon come; weep then.

The houses before us were far from identical. They were painted every color you could think of, yet in the weak light, reduced to basic shapes, their resemblance was striking. All were wooden, with prominent picture windows. All had staircases leading to the beach, and all had the air of a second home, one devoted to leisure rather than struggle.

I stand at the counter slicing cheese, salami, rye bread, spreading mayonnaise, tamping down the lettuce, wrapping the sandwiches carefully in waxed paper for tomorrow’s slunch the exact way my grandmother taught me years before, humming one of my grandfather’s tunes, one he groans out when he sings himself to sleep, tapping his foot, swinging from side to side as though he were burning.

Now in the cool of evening I catch a hint of the forest, of that taking of sudden breath that pines demand; it’s on my skin, a light oil, a sweat born of some forgotten leaning into fire.

Here dwell together still two men of note / who never lived and so can never die.

But you, Roman, remember, rule with all your power the peoples of the earth — these will be your arts: to put your stamp on the works and ways of peace, to spare the defeated, break the proud in war.

Philanthropy is the gateway to power.

“There is still one of which you never speak.’

Marco Polo bowed his head.

‘Venice,’ the Khan said.

Marco smiled. ‘What else do you believe I have been talking to you about?’

The emperor did not turn a hair. ‘And yet I have never heard you mention that name.’

And Polo said: ‘Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.”

There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. “But which is the stone that supports the bridge?” Kublai Khan asks.

“The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,” Marco answers, “but by the line of the arch that they form.”

Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: “Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.”

Polo answers: “Without stones there is no arch.”

Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.

We have children because we can’t remember our own first taste of ambrosia.

Men spoke of the glory of Japan and the weakness of China, that Japan wants the best for Asia, and that China should accept what Japan wants and give up. But what do these words mean? How can ‘Japan’ want something? ‘Japan’ and ‘China’ do not exist. They are just words, fiction. An individual Japanese may be glorious, and an individual Chinese may want something, but how can you speak of ‘Japan’ or ‘China’ wanting, believing, accepting anything? It is all just empty words, myths. But these myths have powerful magic, and they require sacrifices. They require the slaughter of men like sheep.

I was given a gun and ten bullets, and told that if I wanted more bullets, I had to get them from the dead bodies.

The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness

“I’ll tell you what is convenient,” he said after a moment. “To sleep until noon and have someone bring you your breakfast on a tray. To cancel an appointment at the very last minute. To keep a carriage waiting at the door of one party, so that on a moment’s notice it can whisk you away to another. To sidestep marriage in your youth and put off having children altogether. These are the greatest of conveniences, Anushka—and at one time, I had them all. But in the end, it has been the inconveniences that have mattered to me most.”

don’t be clever code is a liability ask, learn, and teach design and architecture matter first make it correct then make it fast only make it fast if you know it matters it’s not done until customers are getting value it’s not done until there’s nothing left to take away don’t automate something you haven’t done manually quick incremental progress is better than the alternative code is shared by the team. there is no such thing as my code it’s easier to change a dry-erase board than a production system code is written to be understood by humans first, computers second

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

“But what does craziness give you?” he said. “What does negative demeanor give you as a person? It doesn’t give you anything. You know that something happened. Your life happened to go in that particular route. If you know that you’re innocent, know it. But at the same time you know you are in trouble & this is how it’s going to be.” To which he added, “To some extent I’m glad this happened to me. I think it strengthened my understanding of what living is all about.” At the end of his trial, when the original jury returned with its guilty verdict, Serge had turned to his lawyer, Kevin Marino, & said, “You know, it did not turn out the way we had hoped. But I have to say, it was a pretty good experience.”

The best way to manage people, he thought, was to convince them that you were good for their careers. He further believed that the only way to get people to believe that you were good for their careers was actually to be good for their careers.

If this story has a soul, it is in the decisions made by its principal characters to resist the temptation of easy money and to pay special attention to the spirit in which they live their working lives. I didn’t write about them because they were controversial. I wrote about them because they were admirable.

When people say, “Oh my god, a book, you must feel great!” most writers get a little half-smile that tells you books are hard to hug close.

The next thing he said I wrote on a slip of paper in his office and have carried it around with me since. It’s our choice, whether to hate something in our lives or to love every moment of them, even the parts that bring us pain. “At every moment, we are volunteers.”

I asked him if he could help me understand that better, and he described a letter from Tolkien in response to a priest who had questioned whether Tolkien’s mythos was sufficiently doctrinaire, since it treated death not as a punishment for the sin of the fall but as a gift. “Tolkien says, in a letter back: ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” Colbert knocked his knuckles on the table. “ ‘What punishments of God are not gifts?’ ” he said again. His eyes were filled with tears. “So it would be ungrateful not to take everything with gratitude. It doesn’t mean you want it. I can hold both of those ideas in my head.”

Have you carried that theme in your head these years in the faint hope you might know it when it finds you, in a far-flung café, as you stand to pay, frozen, and the barista has to ask if you’re okay?

We should have a more conscious attitude toward the sounds – other than music —that we listen to. Presently, the levels of sound and music in the environment have clearly exceeded man’s capacity to assimilate them, and the audio ecosystem is beginning to fall apart. Background music, which is supposed to create ‘atmosphere’, is far too excessive. In our present condition, we find that within certain areas and spaces, aspects of visual design are well attended to, but sound design is completely ignored. It is necessary to treat sound and music with the same level of daily need as we treat architecture, interior design, food, or the air we breathe. In any case, the “Wave Notation” series has begun. I hope it will be used and judged for what I had in mind as ‘sound design’, but of course the listener is free to use it in any way. However, I would hope this music does not become a partner in crime to the flood of sounds and music which inundate us at present.

We’re just two punks, Frank. God kissed us on the brow that night. He gave us all that two people can ever have. And we just weren’t the kind that could have it. We had all that love, and we just cracked up under it. It’s a big airplane engine, that takes you through the sky, right up to the top of the mountain. But when you put it in a Ford, it just shakes it to pieces. That’s what we are, Frank, a couple of Fords.

“Chambers, I think this is the last murder you’ll have a hand in for some time, but if you ever try another, for God’s sake leave insurance companies out of it. They’ll spend five times as much as Los Angeles County will let me put into a case. They’ve got detectives five times as good as any I’ll be able to hire.”

you can’t tell if the ache is bitter or sweet, it returns to the melody, rinsed pure and clean of the past, you almost can’t bear it, the deliverance, the song come home

No reply. It's just a corpse.

As we know a lot of people think of art as something pretty stuffy, but don’t let them kid you. True art has something to say to everyone. Great art unites the masses at every age in every country.

If you’re dumb, surround yourself with smart people. And if you’re smart, surround yourself with smart people who disagree with you.

When I open the door, the brightly lit box awaits me—a dependable, normal world that keeps turning. I have faith in the world inside the light-filled box.

Decisions are made by those who show up.

IDLENESS POLLUTES.

“When the weather is settled, and I have recovered my strength,” said she, “we will take long walks together every day. We will walk to the farm at the edge of the down, and see how the children go on; we will walk to Sir John’s new plantations at Barton Cross, and the Abbeyland; and we will often go to the old ruins of the Priory, and try to trace its foundations as far as we are told they once reached. I know we shall be happy. I know the summer will pass happily away. I mean never to be later in rising than six, and from that time till dinner I shall divide every moment between music and reading. I have formed my plan, and am determined to enter on a course of serious study. Our own library is too well known to me, to be resorted to for anything beyond mere amusement. But there are many works well worth reading, at the Park; and there are others of more modern production which I know I can borrow of Colonel Brandon. By reading only six hours aday, I shall gain in the course of a twelvemonth a great deal of instruction which I now feel myself to want.”

How do mountains?

Wyatt doesn’t have much interest in pressing for a trial or other remedy after all this time. Even if she did, it would be impossible; Lucero’s files indicate that all the physical evidence relating to Wyatt’s case was destroyed — common with no-billed cases — in 2009. All that remains are the urban legends and the memories, the wounds and their scars, a stack of documents in a Texas public safety office, what you know now, and the hope that you will carry it with you into the world.

What deeds have sprung from plow and pick! What bank-rolls from tomatoes! No dainty crop of rhetoric Can match one of potatoes.

i guess night is just when the thoughts grow longer

Once, when I was younger, I thought I could be someone else. I’d move to Casablanca, open a bar, and I’d meet Ingrid Bergman. Or more realistically - whether actually more realistic or not - I’d tune in on a better life, something more suited to my true self. Toward that end, I had to undergo training. I read The Greening of America, and I saw Easy Rider three times. But like a boat with a twisted rudder, I kept coming back to the same place. I wasn’t anywhere. I was myself, waiting on the shore for me to return.

Music brings a warm glow to my vision, thawing mind and muscle from their endless wintering.

In a letter you cannot listen. You must always be speaking.

Every time you meet someone it’s hard not to wonder

who they’ve been—one story breaking so much

into the next: memory engraves its hesitations—

but that night you found yourself unafraid.

Please Sir, Mr God of Death Don’t make it my turn today Not today There is fish curry for dinner.

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

What’s written remains.

just write a poem like a secondhand store full of dishes & leather jackets. vibrating with the leftovers of people. bleeding in solidarity with a woman in a ripped red sweater like an ear, wailing in the street one summer night. a poem full of peach seeds & lightning bugs. a poem that can change the color of the sky.

I ain’t a doctor, but when you grow up running from gunshots all the time, I think there’s something inside you that never leaves.

The secret, he pointed out to me, was that the soap was more than soap. It was a behavior-change delivery vehicle.

“That’s not my problem” is possibly the worst thing people can think, whether they are start- ing an operation, taxiing an airplane full of passengers down a runway, or building a thousand-foot-tall skyscraper. But in medi- cine, we see it all the time. I’ve seen it in my own operating room.

He loved lightning He lived on an island His mother was a Nymph of a river that ran to the sea His father was a gold Cutting tool Old scholia say that Stesichoros says that Geryon had six hands and six feet and wings He was red and His strange red cattle excited envy Herakles came and Killed him for his cattle The dog too

The red world And corresponding red breezes Went on Geryon did not

They were two superior eels / at the bottom of the tank / and they recognized each other like italics.

Words bounce. Words, if you let them, will do what they want to do and what they have to do.

I want to do what a grass stain does.

Dance until your bones clatter. What a prize you are. What a lucky sack of stars.

You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest.

Even under winter’s tightest fist some light still slips through to you, and isn’t that a miracle?

Steal something worthless, something small, / every once in a while. A lighter from the counter. / Call it a gift from the gods of fire. / Call it your due.

We know nothing of how it all works, / how we end up in one bed or another, / speak one language instead of the others, / what heat draws us to our life’s work / or keeps us from a dream until it’s nothing / but a blister we scratch in our sleep.

Even until quite recently, many of the world’s inhabitants were not quite sure of what country they were citizens, or why it should matter. My mother, who was born a Jew in Poland, once told me a joke from her childhood: There was a small town located along the frontier between Russia and Poland; no one was ever quite sure to which it belonged. One day an official treaty was signed and not long after, surveyors arrived to draw a border. Some villagers approached them where they had set up their equipment on a nearby hill. “So where are we, Russia or Poland?” “According to our calculations, your village now begins exactly thirty-seven meters into Poland.” The villagers immediately began dancing for joy. “Why?” the surveyors asked. “What difference does it make?” “Don’t you know what this means?” they replied. “It means we’ll never have to endure another one of those terrible Russian winters!

This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don’t owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly pay. We are constantly told that they are opposites, and that between them they contain the only real human possibilities. But it’s a false dichotomy. States created markets. Markets require states.

I don’t want to fabricate a perfect love anymore. I just want to live a little better. To not be hurt anymore, and to not hurt others. I don’t like it that there’s so much wounding in the world. If there persists in being so much wounding in the world, I don’t want to live in it. My need for true love isn’t so important now. The important thing is to lead a life where no one can wound me anymore.

“You are wise,” he said.

“If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.”

Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

Better, I guess, than the slaughter, is the many-handed god.

In an effort to survive the internet age, the Times has stooped to tracking tweets, chasing the sound and fury of never-ending online spectacles that rarely mean anything to anyone, save for an online microculture dedicated to “the discourse.”

The plebs were us. The plebs were that fight for food and wine, that quarrel over who should be served first and better, that dirty floor on which the waiters clattered back and forth, those increasingly vulgar toasts. The plebs were my mother, who had drunk wine and now was leaning against my father’s shoulder, while he, serious, laughed, his mouth gaping, at the sexual allusions of the metal dealer. They were all laughing, even Lila, with the expression of one who has a role and will play it to the utmost.

We are flying over a ball of fire. The part that has cooled floats on the lava. On that part we construct the buildings, the bridges, and the streets, and every so often the lava comes out of Vesuvius or causes an earthquake that destroys everything. There are microbes everywhere that make us sick and die. There are wars. There is a poverty that makes us all cruel. Every second something might happen that will cause you such suffering that you’ll never have enough tears. And what are you doing? A theology course in which you struggle to understand what the Holy Spirit is? Forget it, it was the Devil who invented the world, not the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Do you want to see the string of pearls that Stefano gave me?”

The conclusion we drew from this convinced us that it was best to do everything on purpose, deliberately, so that you would know what to expect.

Children don’t know the meaning of yesterday, of the day before yesterday, or even of tomorrow, everything is this, now: the street is this, the doorway is this, the stairs are this, this is Mamma, this is Papa, this is the day, this the night.

He was a being created out of some unidentifiable material, iron, glass, nettles, but alive, alive, the hot breath streaming from his nose and mouth.

Only hands can wash hands.

One man’s vulgarity is another man’s lyric.

The core problem with the medicolegal system in Mississippi is that it’s easily manipulated—it serves those in power. Historically, it has served as a means of preserving the state’s white power structure. But that’s only because those in power wanted it that way.

You understand, Lenù, what happens to people: we have too much stuff inside and it swells us, breaks us.

Without these rasping hands, professor, not a chair would exist, or a building, a car, nothing, not even you; if we workers stopped working everything would stop, the sky would fall to earth and the earth would shoot up to the sky, the plants would take over the cities, the Arno would flood your fine houses, and only those who have always worked would know how to survive, and as for you two, you with all your books, the dogs would tear you to pieces.

How clever we were to guess that you were clever.

And this is how I see it today: it’s not the neighborhood that’s sick, it’s not Naples, it’s the entire earth, it’s the universe, or universes. And shrewdness means hiding and hiding from oneself the true state of things.

Safety is an emergent property of systems; it does not reside in a person, device or department of an organization or system. Safety cannot be purchased or manufactured; it is not a feature that is separate from the other components of the system. This means that safety cannot be manipulated like a feedstock or raw material. The state of safety in any system is always dynamic; continuous systemic change insures that hazard and its management are constantly changing.

Catastrophe is always just around the corner.

Overt catastrophic failure occurs when small, apparently innocuous failures join to create opportunity for a systemic accident.

It sometimes seems to me that if I could persuade everyone to say “systematize” each time he wanted to say “liberate” and to say “mobilization” every time he wanted to say “reform” or “progress” I would not have to write long books about government-peasant interaction in Russia.

Don’t misunderstand: being a good person requires much more than being a good craftsman. But there is honor among craftsmen, and becoming a good craftsman necessarily entails acquiring certain virtues also essential to becoming a good person.

This is something you do for a billion years or not at all.

Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.

One can’t go on anymore, she said, electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave traces of yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing, my favorite key is the one that deletes.

To write, you have to want something to survive you.

“Things are told or not told: you remained in the middle.”

I’m a scribble on a scribble, completely unsuitable for one of your books; forget it, Lenù, one doesn’t tell the story of an erasure.

One might, on the basis of experience, derive a few rules of thumb that, if observed, could make development planning less prone to disaster. While my main goal is hardly a point-by-point reform of development practice, such rules would surely include something along the following lines.

Take small steps. In an experimental approach to social change, presume that we cannot know the consequences of our interventions in advance. Given this postulate of ignorance, prefer wherever possible to take a small step, stand back, observe, and then plan the next small move. As the biologist J. B. S. Haldane metaphorically described the advantages of smallness: “You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mineshaft; and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat is killed, a man broken, a horse splashes.”

Favor reversibility. Prefer interventions that can easily be undone if they turn out to be mistakes. Irreversible interventions have irreversible consequences.Interventions into ecosystems require particular care in this respect, given our great ignorance about how they interact. Aldo Leopold captured the spirit of caution required: “The first rule of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts.”

Plan on surprises. Choose plans that allow the largest accommodation to the unforeseen. In agricultural schemes this may mean choosing and preparing land so that it can grow any of several crops. In planning housing, it would mean “designing in” flexibility for accommodating changes in family structures or living styles. In a factory it may mean selecting a location, layout, or piece of machinery that allows for new processes, materials, or product lines down the road.

Plan on human inventiveness. Always plan under the assumption that those who become involved in the project later will have or will develop the experience and insight to improve on the design.

A brief example comparing war memorials may be helpful. The Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C., is surely one of the most successful war memorials ever built, if one is to judge by the quantity and intensity of the visits it receives. Designed by Maya Lin, the memorial consists simply of a gently undulating site marked (not dominated) by a long, low, black marble wall listing the names of the fallen. The names are listed neither alphabetically nor by military unit but chronologically, in the order in which they fell—thus grouping those who had fallen on the same day in the same engagement.[895] No larger claim is made about the war either in prose or in sculpture—which is hardly surprising, in view of the stark political cleavages the war still inspires.[896] What is most remarkable, however, is the way that the Vietnam Memorial works for those who visit it, particularly those who come to pay their respects to the memory of a comrade or loved one. They touch the names incised on the wall, make rubbings, and leave artifacts and mementos of their own—everything from poems and a woman’s highheeled shoe to a glass of champagne and a poker hand of a full house, aces high. So many of these tributes have been left, in fact, that a museum has been created to house them. The scene of many people together at the wall, touching the names of particular loved ones who fell in the same war, has moved observers regardless of their position on the war itself. I believe that a great part of the memorial’s symbolic power is its capacity to honor the dead with an openness that allows visitors to impress upon it their own meanings, their own histories, their own memories. The memorial virtually requires participation in order to complete its meaning. Although one would not compare it to a Rorschach test, the memorial nevertheless does achieve its meaning as much by what citizens bring to it as by what it imposes.

Compare the Vietnam Memorial to a very different American war memorial: the sculpture depicting the raising of the American flag at the summit of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima in World War II. Moving in its own right, referring as it does to the final moment of a victory gained at an enormous cost in lives, the Iwo Jima statue is manifestly heroic. Its patriotism (symbolized by the flag), its reference to conquest, its larger-than-life scale, and its implicit theme of unity in victory leave little room for wondering what is expected from the viewer. Given the virtual unanimity with which that war was, and is, viewed in the United States, it is hardly surprising that the Iwo Jima memorial should be monumental and explicit about its message. Although not exactly “canned,” the Iwo Jima site is more symbolically self-sufficient, as are most war memorials. Visitors can stand in awe, gazing on an image that through photographs and sculpture has become a virtual icon for the War in the Pacific, but they receive its message rather than completing it.[897]

The discovery of the things that matter is three quarters of the battle.

Tomorrow when the farm boys find this freak of nature, they will wrap his body in newspaper and carry him to the museum.

But tonight he is alive and in the north field with his mother. It is a perfect summer evening: the moon rising over the orchard, the wind in the grass. And as he stares into the sky, there are twice as many stars as usual.

Writing about illness is a form of travel writing.

“You’ve had a strange journey.”

“Stranger than most.”

“I would like to hear about it.”

“It’s a long story.”

“If only we were trapped in a castle, in the middle of winter, with nowhere to go.”

When things were going well, I was reading newspapers articles and they were calling me Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker.

When things weren’t going well, they were calling me Romelu Lukaku, the Belgian striker of Congolese descent.

For eight euros — about the price of a sandwich — tourists can see some building foundations of the ancient Gallo-Roman town of Lutetia in the “archaelogical crypt” of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Visitors’ puzzled glances reveal the unspoken question “why are we looking at these bits and pieces?” The answer is: because that’s all that’s left.

Being struck by lightning is increasingly unlikely.

It boils down to this: you aren’t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren’t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution.

The world’s most deadly fluff is: “I would definitely buy that.”

Trying to learn from customer conversations is like excavating a delicate archaeological site. The truth is down there somewhere, but it’s fragile. While each blow with your shovel gets you closer to the truth, you’re liable to smash it into a million little pieces if you use too blunt an instrument.

It was — tragic. …What will we do til spring?

Why must things have meanings? This is what America means to me: I imagine a prairie.

I only want a patron saint to protect me. / I only want someone else to bleed.

Spend twice as long looking at it as drawing it.

Our jobs make relentless calls on a narrow band of our faculties, reducing our chances of achieving rounded personalities and leaving us to suspect (often in the gathering darkness of a Sunday evening) that much of who we are, or could be, has gone unexplored.

What we call a home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistenly available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding onto. As we write, so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us.

It is in dialogue with pain that many beautiful things acquire their value. Acquaintance with grief turns out to be one of the more unusual prerequisites of architectural appreciation. We might, quite aside from all other requirements, need to be a little sad before buildings can properly touch us.

In short, bureaucracy creates for managers a Calvinist world without a Calvinist God, a world marked with the same profound anxiety that characterized the old Protestant ethic but one stripped of that ideology’s comforting illusions. Bureaucracy poses for managers an intricate set of moral mazes that are paradigmatic of the quandaries of public life in our social order. Within this framework, the puzzle for many individual managers becomes: How does one act in such a world and maintain a sense of personal integrity?

Striking, distinctive characteristics of any sort, in fact, are dangerous in the corporate world. One of the most damaging things, for instance, that can be said about a manager is that he is brilliant. This almost invariably signals a judgment that the person has publicly asserted his intelligence and is perceived as a threat to others. What good is a wizard who makes his colleagues and his customers uncomfortable?

Work becomes more ambiguous, directed as it is toward maneuvering money, symbols, organizational structures, and especially people.

What is right in the corporation is not what is right in a man’s home or in his church. What is right in the corporation is what the guy above you wants from you. That’s what morality is in the corporation.

Have fun. If you are not having fun with a puzzle, then move to a different one. If you are tired, take a break, or get sleep. But do not let yourself dread what you are doing. You win Mystery Hunt by having fun; if you are not having fun, you are not playing by the rules.

Strange things are usually a good sign that there’s treachery afoot.

Do things that are straightforward first. If there is a set of word clues, solve them. If there are snippets of music, identify them.

All men are allowed to have a secret or two.

[What is your writing process like?] Panic; panic; hope.

[We] couldn’t go on across the Eiffestrasse because the asphalt road had melted. There were people on the roadway, some already dead, some still lying alive but stuck in the asphalt. They must have rushed onto the roadway without thinking. Their feet had got stuck and then they had put out their hands to try to get out again. They were on their hands and knees screaming.

If we find poetry in the service station and motel, if we are drawn to the airport or train carriage, it is perhaps because, in spite of their architectural compromises and discomforts, in spite of their garish colours and harsh lighting, we implicitly feel that these isolated places offer us a material setting for an alternative to the selfish ease, the habits and confinement of the ordinary, rooted world.

What people love is not words that they don’t know but words they forgot they knew.

“If it were meant to be illegal,” you remind him sagely, “Sun Microsystems would have made it unrepresentable.”

The purpose of a park, Moses had been telling his designers for years, wasn’t to overawe or impress; it was to encourage the having of a good time.

Keeping something because it would be a waste to get rid of it is a kind of torture.

Presumably man’s spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.

A spider web of metal, sealed in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short, the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million, tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets—and it works! Its gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for months; now it is built for thirty cents.

Had a Pharaoh been given detailed and explicit designs of an automobile, and had he understood them completely, it would have taxed the resources of his kingdom to have fashioned the thousands of parts for a single car, and that car would have broken down on the first trip to Giza.

There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.

Actually, having a jet is a really big deal. If I were queen of the world, I would pass a law against private jets, because they enable you to get around a certain reality. You don’t have to go through an airport terminal, you don’t have to interact, you don’t have to be patient, you don’t have to be uncomfortable. These are the things that remind us we’re human.

My dad’s plane was a 737, and it was insane to have a 737 as a private airplane. It had a queen-sized bed with one big long seatbelt across it, and a shower, and it was ridiculous. We would use the plane occasionally because I have four kids, so it was much easier, obviously, to ride on my dad’s plane with them. Then, at a certain point, I just said, “No, I think this is really bad for everybody.”

Like any other creative endeavour, software development can’t be sped up as much as we can eliminate the phenomena that slow it down. Advancements in process and tooling, and the computing resources to run them, can be interpreted as doing exactly this. The result is that developers can spend a larger fraction of their time on application logic.

The popular meme of maturing a product from skateboard, to bike, to motorcycle, to car is a cute story, but the way software tends to actually be made is more like going from engine, to drivetrain, to monocoque, to interior.

Except software isn’t like a car at all: if anything it’s more like a university campus, where different buildings are complete artifacts in their own right but loosely couple together to form a unified service. It is perfectly reasonable for some parts to be undergoing construction while others are being planned. Taken as a whole at any given moment, some parts of the system will have more detail and others will have less. Our notions of iteration and incrementality therefore have to also make room for media other than code.

”eww she fuck the weed man for weed” — a bitch that’s fucking the texts man for texts

(This also reminds me of something that Paul Ford said many moons ago, that if a company asks for a magazine design or a giant billboard poster then that’s relatively easy. You do the design and it doesn’t necessarily change the organization at all. But if they ask for a website then suddenly this bleeds into all other parts of their organization. The website will ask questions of them that require a fundamental change in how they work, how they think about their business.)

It is true that a computer, for example, can be used for good or evil. It is true that a helicopter can be used as a gunship and it can also be used to rescue people from a mountain pass. And if the question arises of how a specific device is going to be used, in what I call an abstract ideal society, then one might very well say one cannot know.

But we live in a concrete society, [and] with concrete social and historical circumstances and political realities in this society, it is perfectly obvious that when something like a computer is invented, then it is going to be adopted will be for military purposes. It follows from the concrete realities in which we live, it does not follow from pure logic. But we’re not living in an abstract society, we’re living in the society in which we in fact live.

If you look at the enormous fruits of human genius that mankind has developed in the last 50 years, atomic energy and rocketry and flying to the moon and coherent light, and it goes on and on and on – and then it turns out that every one of these triumphs is used primarily in military terms. So it is not reasonable for a scientist or technologist to insist that he or she does not know – or ca not know – how it is going to be used.

the best of life is life lived quietly, where nothing happens but our calm journey through the day, where change is imperceptible and the precious life is everything.

The most disturbing aspect of ‘morality’ seems to me to be the frequency with which the word now appears; in the press, on television, in the most perfunctory kinds of conversation. Questions of straightforward power (or survival) politics, questions of quite indifferent public policy, questions of almost anything; they are all assigned these factitious moral burdens. There is something facile going on, some self-indulgence at work. Of course we would all like to ‘believe’ in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home…. [But] when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.

You might protest that no family has been in the Sacramento Valley for anything approaching “always.” But it is characteristic of Californians to speak grandly of the past as if it has simultaneously begun, tabula rasa, and reached a happy ending on the day the wagons headed west. Eureka—“I Have Found It”—as the state motto has it.

It all comes back. Perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but I do see it; I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were. I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be; one of them, a seventeen-year-old, presents little threat, although it would be of some interest to me to know again what it feels like to sit on a river levee drinking vodka-and-orange-juice and listening to Les Paul and Mary Ford and their echoes sing “How High the Moon” on the car radio. (You see I still have the scenes, but I no longer perceive myself among those present, no longer could ever improvise the dialogue.) The other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. She was always a good deal of trouble, and I suspect she will reappear when I least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories I do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished. It is a good idea, then, to keep in touch, and I suppose that keeping in touch is what notebooks are all about. And we are all on our own when it comes to keeping those lines open to ourselves: your notebook will never help me, nor mine you.

Communication often interrupts, so good communication is often about saying the right thing at the right time in the right way with the fewest side effects.

Poor communication creates more work.

Internal communication based on long-form writing, rather than a verbal tradition of meetings, speaking, and chatting, leads to a welcomed reduction in meetings, video conferences, calls, or other real-time opportunities to interrupt and be interrupted.

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore. It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking; which, did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only. The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.

[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]

Who shall blame him, if, so standing for a moment he dwells upon fame, upon search parties, upon cairns raised by grateful followers over his bones? Finally, who shall blame the leader of the doomed expedition, if, having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to the last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he now perceives by some pricking in his toes that he lives, and does not on the whole object to live, but requires sympathy, and whisky, and some one to tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who shall blame him? Who will not secretly rejoice when the hero puts his armour off, and halts by the window and gazes at his wife and son, who, very distant at first, gradually come closer and closer, till lips and book and head are clearly before him, though still lovely and unfamiliar from the intensity of his isolation and the waste of ages and the perishing of the stars, and finally putting his pipe in his pocket and bending his magnificent head before her–who will blame him if he does homage to the beauty of the world?

Animorphs was always a war story. Wars don’t end happily. Not ever. Often relationships that were central during war, dissolve during peace. Some people who were brave and fearless in war are unable to handle peace, feel disconnected and confused. Other times people in war make the move to peace very easily. Always people die in wars. And always people are left shattered by the loss of loved ones.

That’s what happens, so that’s what I wrote. Jake and Cassie were in love during the war, and end up going their seperate ways afterward. Jake, who was so brave and capable during the war is adrift during the peace. Marco and Ax, on the other hand, move easily past the war and even manage to use their experience to good effect. Rachel dies, and Tobias will never get over it. That doesn’t by any means cover everything that happens in a war, but it’s a start.

Here’s what doesn’t happen in war: there are no wondrous, climactic battles that leave the good guys standing tall and the bad guys lying in the dirt. Life isn’t a World Wrestling Federation Smackdown. Even the people who win a war, who survive and come out the other side with the conviction that they have done something brave and necessary, don’t do a lot of celebrating. There’s very little chanting of ‘we’re number one’ among people who’ve personally experienced war.

I’m just a writer, and my main goal was always to entertain. But I’ve never let Animorphs turn into just another painless video game version of war, and I wasn’t going to do it at the end. I’ve spent 60 books telling a strange, fanciful war story, sometimes very seriously, sometimes more tongue-in-cheek. I’ve written a lot of action and a lot of humor and a lot of sheer nonsense. But I have also, again and again, challenged readers to think about what they were reading. To think about the right and wrong, not just the who-beat-who. And to tell you the truth I’m a little shocked that so many readers seemed to believe I’d wrap it all up with a lot of high-fiving and backslapping. Wars very often end, sad to say, just as ours did: with a nearly seamless transition to another war.

So, you don’t like the way our little fictional war came out? You don’t like Rachel dead and Tobias shattered and Jake guilt-ridden? You don’t like that one war simply led to another? Fine. Pretty soon you’ll all be of voting age, and of draft age. So when someone proposes a war, remember that even the most necessary wars, even the rare wars where the lines of good and evil are clear and clean, end with a lot of people dead, a lot of people crippled, and a lot of orphans, widows and grieving parents.

"In your labyrinth there are three lines too many," he said at last. "I know of a Greek labyrinth which is a single straight line. Along this line so many philosophers have lost themselves that a mere detective might well do so too. Scharlach, when, in some other incarnation you hunt me, feign to commit (or do commit) a crime at A, then a second crime at B, eight kilometers from A, then a third crime at C, four kilometers from A and B, halfway enroute between the two. Wait for me later at D, two kilometers from A and C, halfway, once again, between both. Kill me at D, as you are now going to kill me at Triste-le-Roy." "The next time I kill you," said Scharlach, "I promise you the labyrinth made of the single straight line which is invisible and everlasting." He stepped back a few paces. Then, very carefully, he fired.

Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good.

Power makes you lazy. Insofar as our earlier theoretical discussion of structural violence revealed anything, it was this: that while those in situations of power and privilege often feel it as a terrible burden of responsibility, in most ways, most of the time, power is all about what you don’t have to worry about, don’t have to know about, and don’t have to do. Bureaucracies can democratize this sort of power, at least to an extent, but they can’t get rid of it. It becomes forms of institutionalized laziness. Revolutionary change may involve the exhilaration of throwing off imaginative shackles, of suddenly realizing that impossible things are not impossible at all, but it also means most people will have to get over some of this deeply habituated laziness and start engaging in interpretive (imaginative) labor for a very long time to make those realities stick.