Category: Quotes

Time isn’t straightforward, it mixes everything up, shuffles the dead, merges them, separates them out again, advances backward, retreats in reverse, spins like a merry-go-round, like a tiny wheel in a laboratory cage, and traps us in funerals and marches and detentions, leaving us with no assurance of continuity or escape.

~Nona Fernández, Space Invaders (translated by Natasha Wimmer)

I may have to keep some place where I can go to be myself, now and then, for I cannot guarantee to endure at all times the confinements of even an attractive cage.

~Amelia Earhart (in a letter to her fiancé and publicist, George Putnam)

Whicken (noun, verb) – to awake from the death of winter. Made use of in reference to the lengthening of days and the revival of vegetation in spring:

“Ah saw a primrooas as Ah com on rooad; things is beginnin’ ti whicken.”

~from A Glossary of the Dialect of Mid-Yorkshire, 1876

Every second of waking life is one big game of finding the needle in the haystack, although it’s really more like ignoring all the haystacks so we can find the needle that’s really important to us.

~Bill Keaggy

This is what time travel is. It’s looking at a person, and seeing them in the present, and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.

~ Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin

It amazes me how, even though I’ve read all 705 pages of Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and was completely convinced by it, when Twitter nudges me towards some opinion piece on Trump on some news site, I can’t consent to all the cookies quickly enough. Take all the data you want so long as you get that box of text out of my way.

This is how the world ends, isn’t it?

Someone pressing:

I agree

I agree

I agree

I agree

~Delphi, Clare Pollard

What is a clitoris? the papers wished to know. Is it an unsteadiness in the hand? Is it a trembling in the mouth? Is it an organ unduly excited or overdeveloped?

~After Sappho, Selby Wynn Schwartz

Fun happens when we experience the confluence of three states: playfulness, connectedness, and flow. Fun requires being entirely present in your experience.

~Catherine Price

I consider reading the greatest bargain in the world. A shelf of books is a shelf of many lives and ideas and imaginations which the reader can enjoy whenever he wishes and as often as he wishes. Instead of experiencing just one life, the book-lover can experience hundreds or even thousands of lives.

~Gene Roddenberry

A story is never an answer. A story is always a question.

~Companion Piece, Ali Smith