“Feelings, especially socially shared ones, guide us towards a sense of what we think is right, but they also guide us away from things. People pay a lot of attention to what other people are thinking, and they start to feel the friction of being not fully in agreement with others. This can arouse feelings of anxiety or triumph . . . but it doesn’t pass unnoticed.” – From What Art Does (Faber & Faber, 2025) 

 Every native population, civilised or not, regards its lands as its national home, of which it is the sole master, and it wants to retain that mastery always; it will refuse to admit not only new masters but, even new partners or collaborators.  -- Vladimir Jabotinsky

 "The idea is like grass.  It craves light, like crowds, thrives on crossbreeding, grows better for being stepped on." -- Ursula Le Guin

 Retweeted Existential Comics (@existentialcoms):

A good book is one you can't put down.

A great book is one you have to put down after each chapter.

But a true masterpiece is one you can't even bring yourself to pick up to begin with.

 “Everything is what it is because it got that way."
    -- Scottish biologist D’Arcy Thompson

“It’s just rich white guys that don’t want to be told what to do,” and I had a zillion answers to that — and now that seems 100 percent accurate. - Penn Gillette 

As you live your life, it appears to be anarchy and chaos, and random events, non-related events, smashing into each other and causing this situation or that situation, and then, this happens, and it’s overwhelming, and it just looks like what in the world is going on. And later, when you look back at it, it looks like a finely crafted novel. But at the time, it don’t. -- Joe Walsh