[quotes] The Three-Body Problem - Cixin Liu 2006 (trans. Ken Liu 2014)

 

"The abbot shook his head and said, 'No, emptiness is not nothingness. Emptiness is a type of existence. You must use this existential emptiness to fill yourself.'"

"Does it represent the yearning for order, or the surrender to chaos?"

"We can have no sea birds, but we can't be without oil. Can you imagine life without oil?"

"These are the rules of the game of civilization: The first priority is to guarantee the existence of the human race and their comfortable life. Everything else is secondary."

"'I don't care if this is meaningless. I can't stop. If I stop I'll fall apart.' Evans cut down a crooked branch with a practiced swing."

"A society with such advanced science must also have more advanced moral standards."

[quotes] The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 1986

 

"But there's a literary form I haven't mentioned yet: the literature of witness. Offred records her story as best she can; then she hides it, trusting that it may be discovered later, by someone who is free to understand it and share it. This is an arc of hope: every recorded story implies a future reader."

"I avoid looking down at my body, not so much because it's shameful or immodest but because I don't want to see it. I don't want to look at something that determines me so completely."

"Maybe none of this is about control. Maybe it isn't really about who can own whom, who can do what to whom and get away with it, even as far as death. Maybe it isn't about who can sit and who has to kneel or stand or lie down, legs spread open. Maybe it's about who can do what to whom and be forgiven for it. Never tell me it amounts to the same thing."

"Even though some of them no more than fourteen - Start them soon is the policy, there's not a moment to be lost - still they'll remember. And the ones after them will, for three or four or five years; but after that they won't. They'll always have been in white, in groups of girls; they'll always have been silent."

"Falling in love, I said. Falling into it, we all did then, one way or another.... It was the central thing; it was the way you understood yourself; if it never happened to you, not ever, you would be like a mutant, a creature from outer space. Everyone knew that."

[quotes] Nudge - Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein 2008

  

"The clear lesson here is that consistent and unwavering people, in the private or public sector, can move groups and practices in their preferred direction."

"Small interventions and even coincidences, at a key stage, can produce large variations in the outcome."

"It turns out that if you ask people, the day before the election, whether they intend to vote, you can increase the probability of their voting by as much as 25 percent!"

"One way to start thinking about incentives is to ask four questions about a particular choice architecture:
Who uses?
Who chooses?
Who pays?
Who profits?"

"One solution to the political problem of getting such bills passed may be to use some mental accounting. For example, the revenues from a carbon tax might be paired with a cut in personal tax rates, the funding for Social Security and Medicare, or the provision of universal health insurance. Similarly, the "rights" to pollute in a cap-and-trade system can be auctioned off, and the revenues used in the same way. This linking of costs and benefits might help the pill go down more easily."

"People who want to signal their green credentials are much happier in a Prius than a hybrid Camry because no one will know that the Camry is a hybrid unless she carefully examines some labeling on the car."

"So put it simply, forcing people to choose is not always wise, and remaining neutral is not always possible."

"It is not possible to avoid choice architecture, and in that sense it is not possible to avoid influencing people."

[quotes] Weapons of Math Destruction - Cathy O'Neil 2016

 

"if the people being evaluated are kept in the dark, the thinking goes, they'll be less likely to attempt to game the system. Instead, they'll simply have to work hard, follow the rules, and pray that the model registers and appreciates their efforts."

"So thanks to a highly questionable model, a poor school lost a good teacher, and a rich school, which didn't fire people on the basis of their students' scores, gained one."

"That's how trustworthy models operate. They maintain a constant back-and-forth with whatever in the world they're trying to understand or predict. Conditions change, and so must the model."

"Our own values and desires influence our choices, from the data we choose to collect to the questions we ask. Models are opinions embedded in mathematics."

"... sentencing models that profile a person by his of her circumstances help to create the environment that justifies their assumptions. This destructive model loop goes round and round, and in the process the model becomes more and more unfair."

"A young suburbanite with every advantage - the prep school education, the exhaustive coaching for college admissions tests, the overseas semester in Paris or Shanghai - still flatters himself that it is his skill, hard work, and prodigious problem-solving abilities that have lifted him into a world of privilege. Money vindicates all doubts."

"The top 20 percent of the population controls 89 percent of the wealth in the country, and the bottom 40 percent controls none of it. Their assets are negative: the average household in this enormous and struggling underclass has a net debt of $14,800."

"So even if our model is color blind, the result is anything but. In our largely segregated cities, geography is a highly effective proxy for race."

"The result is that we criminalize poverty, believing all the while that our tools are not only scientific but fair."

"...we've seen time and again that mathematical models can sift through data to locate people who are likely to face great challenges, whether from crime, poverty, or education. It's up to society whether to use that intelligence to reject and punish them - or to reach out to them with the resources they need. We can use the efficiency that make WMDs so pernicious in order to help people."

"... Simpson's Paradox: when a whole body of data displays one trend, yet when broken into subgroups, the opposite trend comes into view for each of those subgroups."

"While that campaign launched into public view, hundreds of others continue to hover below the surface, addressing individual voters."

"As this happens, it will become harder to access the political message our neighbors are seeing - and as result, to understand why they believe what they do, often passionately."

"As is often the case with WMDs, the very same models that inflict damage could be used to humanity's benefit. Instead of targeting people in order to manipulate them, it could line them up for help."

"Many of these models, like some of the WMDs we've discussed, will arrive with the best intentions. But they must also deliver transparency, disclosing the input data they're using as well as the results of their targeting. And they must be open to audits."

[quotes] Dirty Thirty - Asa Akira 2016

 

"There's something about walking around a foreign country by yourself...it's the most anonymous, magical feeling. I feel the most empowered when I do this."

[poems] Pillow Thoughts - Courtney Peppernell 2017

 

this is the first poetry book I've read. here are some of my favorites.

I know what it feels like
for my heart to ache
and my soul to cry.
I know what it feels like
for things to be so hard
it takes everything to get by.
I know what it feels like
when nothing seems steady
and for things to derail.
I know what it feels like
to have person after person
cause your heart to fail.
But one day I hope you see
the love you give yourself
heals all parts eventually.
Until finally she walks in
and sets your heart free
and reminds you why
everyone else
wasn't meant to be.


But life is not about half doing. You cannot half love, or half
accept, or half live. It's about giving everything you have.
When you are old and worn, do you really want to look back
and say you gave the bare minimum? You owe yourself more
than that.

Some things will never be fair for everyone. This is the saddest
realization that the universe can teach. So if they are fair for
you, remember to be grateful.

Even on bad days and cold nights where it feels it has all but
gone. You still have purpose. It has been inside you since the
day you were born. A tiny little firefly born from the light of
the universe. There is a world of reason inside you, an entire
library of thoughts and emotions. For all the moments that
steal your hope, just remember the universe intended for you
to happen. You have purpose.

[quotes] Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe - Benjamin Alire Sáenz 2012

 

"I bet you could sometimes find all of the mysteries of the universe in someone's hand."

"The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain."

"Dante who loved kissing dogs, who loved kissing his parents, who loved kissing boys, who even loved kissing girls. Maybe kissing was part of the human condition. Maybe I wasn't human."

"I tried to bring my thoughts back to the kitchen. Where I was. Where I lived. I hated the thing of living in my head."

"To be careful with people and with words was a rare and beautiful thing."

"High school was just a prologue to the real novel. Everybody got to write you - but when you graduated, you got to write yourself. At graduation you got to collect your teacher's pens and your parents' pens and you got your own pen. And you could do all the writing."

"'Because I can't stand watching all that loneliness that lives inside you. Because I love you, Ari."

[quotes] Waiting for Godot - Samuel Beckett 1954

 

"We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?"

[quotes] Notes of a Crocodile - Qiu Miaojim 1994

 

"Being in college gave me a sense of vocation. It exempted me from an oppressive system of social and personal responsibility - from going through the motions like a cog, from being whipped and beaten by everyone for not having worked hard enough and then having to put on a repentant face afterwards."

"Ever since I started to wise up, my family's been perpetually disappointed in me. Though it hurt them, I shattered their image of me little by little. If I didn't, I'd have to sacrifice myself in order to maintain a false ideal. I've been trying really hard to get over my resentment. It's cause them no small amount of pain."

"I'll always feel love for them and have basic needs to be met, so it takes courage to draw the line. But if I don't, my love for them and my needs will become bargaining chips that I have to exchange for my independence."

"'It was one night about two or three years ago when my world started to change. I wasn't really sure what exactly was changing, but suddenly, there I was, in an unfamiliar place."

"As dolphins hear the call of their shared language and must turn back toward their origins, the three of us found ourselves attuned to a common frequency. It was an experience too profound for words."

"Though I don't understand how that's considered love on your part, I'm not negating it either. I guess everyone has a different way of expressing their love. No matter how it comes out, it always finds its way to the person it was meant for. I just didn't know - or care - if it would last."

"As I stood on the edge, you took hold of my heart, and suddenly I realized that somewhere in this great big world, there really was a you that loved me."

"Ever since I was little and started to learn what it meant to love, I never understood that I had to love me too - otherwise, what was the point? If I wanted to join the rest of humanity, the only solution was gradually to reveal my secret."

"'Only healthy people are capable of being in love. Using love to treat an illness just makes the illness even worse.'"

"Man's greatest sorrow is the loss of what was once his greatest desire."

"At Tun Tun's encouragement, I made a big decision: I wasn't going to fall in love with another woman. This time, I was going to make a clean break with the past and pursue a normal happiness."

"The best way for any relationship to end is with the sentiment I wish the best for you, and I am grateful for what we once had together."

"A certain part of me has died as I've learned to leave behind the qualities of my youth - the overanxiousness, oversensitivity, and self-consciousness, not to mention arrogance and idealism, that diminish with life experience. I was a late bloomer, but at long last, I lost my expectations but lacked the self-knowledge to comprehend my own passions and vices."

[quotes] Exile and Pride - Eli Clare 1999

 

"... to divide ourselves for the sake of other people's ease. It grew from standing in doorways we couldn't enter with our whole selves, where our multiple loyalties were attacked as treason instead of being recognized as the richly generative forces they are."

"Instead it keeps issuing this challenging invitation: to bring our whole broken selves to these problems within which we struggle and engage them with all of our beings. Search your pockets. Start jotting down, your own map of contradictions."

"The body as home, but only if it is understood that bodies can be stolen, fed lies and poison, torn away from us. They rise up around me - bodies stolen by hunger, war, breast cancer, AIDS, rape; the daily grind of factory, sweatshop, cannery, sawmill; the lynching rope; the freezing streets; the nursing home and prison."

"Will we remember and support Brenda and Wanda Hansen of Camp Sister Spirit, white, rural, working-class lesbians who are building and maintaining lesbian and feminist space in rural Mississippi, when the homophobic violence they face - dead dogs in their mailbox, gunfire at night - no longer makes the headlines?"

"The exclusivity of queer community shaped by urban, middle-class assumptions."

"I want each of us to be able to bring our queerness home."

"If we as a country are finally deciding, after five centuries of white-led cultural and environmental rampage across North America, to save the spotted owl and fragments of its habitat, then we as a people need to be accountable to the folks who will be unemployed, possibly homeless and hungry, because of that decision."

"Yes, Wal-Marts exist across the country. But the development of low-paying service jobs in national and multinational chain stores to the inevitable detriment of locally owned businesses will never be the answer to the economic crises in fishing and logging towns."

"I adore its defiant external edge, its comfortable internal truth. Queer belongs to me."

"I want to hear their stories, but like the stories of other marginalized people, they were most often never told, but rather eaten up, thrown away, lost in the daily grind of survival."

"Marginalized people from many communities create their own internal tensions and hostilities, and disabled people are no exception."

"The construction of gender depends not only upon the male body and female body, but also upon the nondisabled body."

"The tension between the one who is shaking the world up and the one who simply wants an entrance into that world shadows many marginalized, politicized communities today."

"What if instead of fighting on behalf of the shrinking number of people who have jobs with health benefits to be able to share them with spouses, we fight for universal health care?"

"What if instead of fighting for family recognition for lesbian and gay parents through marriage, we fight to end the racist, classist, ableist, homophobic, and transphobic child welfare and family law systems that tear so many families and communities apart?"