spoko > spoko's Quotes

“Freedom is but the negative aspect of the whole phenomenon whose positive aspect is responsibleness.”
― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

“You could envision yourself with webbing on your arms or insects in your mouth, but you’d still be creating a mental caricature of you as a bat. “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat,” [Thomas] Nagel wrote. “Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.”

[emphasis mine]”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“On this journey through nature’s Umwelten, our intuitions will be our biggest liabilities, and our imaginations will be our greatest assets.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“I was transported into a totally different world. . . . It was sensory travel. I was in the same place, but stepping between these two really cool environments.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“When we pay attention to other animals, our own world expands and deepens.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“Senses that seem paranormal to us only appear this way because we are so limited and so painfully unaware of our limitations.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“If you’re slow enough, you’re just part of the background.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“Naively, we might imagine this to be a problem of vocabulary, as if there might exist some word-chirp dictionary that would suddenly allow us to speak bird. There isn’t, and Dooling’s work reminds us why: The communication barrier between species is also a sensory one.

[emphasis mine]”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“A whale can plan. In the introduction, I wrote about Malcolm MacIver’s hypothesis that when animals moved from the water to the land, the extra range of their vision enabled the evolution of more sophisticated minds, capable of planning. I wonder if the same hypothesis might work in reverse for echolocation.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“Distinguishing self from other isn’t a given; it’s a difficult problem that nervous systems have to solve. ‘This is largely what sentience is,’ neuroscientist Michael Hendricks tells me. ‘And perhaps it’s why sentience is: It’s the process of sorting perceptual experiences into self-generated and other-generated.’

That sorting process doesn’t require consciousness, or any advanced mental abilities. ‘It isn’t some fancy, late-added thing in evolution,” Hendricks says. It exists in nervous systems with a few hundred neurons and those with tens of billions. It’s a foundational condition of animal existence.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“As we desecrate sensory environments, we become accustomed to the results. As we push animals away, we get used to their absence.”
― Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us

“In its broadest sense, an ecosystem is the network of interactions between all living members of the community and the land or water that forms its environment.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds

“Life evolves to fit the world in which it finds itself, but geography, of ocean currents, the position of the continents, wind patterns and atmospheric chemistry defines the parameters of that world.”
― Thomas Halliday, Otherlands: A Journey Through Earth's Extinct Worlds

“But this home over here: it needed paint but had flowers neatly planted all the way around it. That one over there had a tire swing out front, tied to a fat magnolia tree. Behind another, a lush vegetable garden. You got to fight not to give into despair, he told himself. You got to see the good that's mixed in with the bad.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

“That was the point of Mardi Gras, was it not? To serve and honor all the people, to bring into hard lives a touch of royalty and grandeur....To put on a spectacle such as this, free of charge, was an honor. New Orleans was sick and wounded, but no other city in the world had a celebration quite like this. It was beautiful precisely because it was so frivolous.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

“Other people's children went off to college, which for years Ronald had interpreted as a positive thing. Lately, though, he wasn't so sure. The children who went off to college hardly ever came back. It was as though the hard work of getting that college degree bent them out of shape, focused them too much on their own personal achievement. Once you got that degree, it was all about getting ahead in that monetized struggle, and they forgot the community that raised them. Ooh, live in the Lower Nine; not me. Ooh, do a day's work with your hands; I won't touch that. The neighborhood gained something when one of its children went off to become a doctor or an engineer, but it lost something, too.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

“In New Orleans, no matter how much money you had in the bank, you looked on poverty every day.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

“Americans, whether armed or not, were still looking everywhere but at social class when parsing the texture of their lives. It wasn’t so much that stressed-out blue-collar folks were clinging bitterly to their guns and religion, as Barack Obama had posited while running for president. It was more that guns and religion were keeping them from feeling bitter about the indignities inflicted on the middle class.”
― Dan Baum, Gun Guys: A Road Trip

“New Orleanians are notoriously late showing up, if they show up at all, because by and large they don't keep calendars. Calendars are tools for managing the future, and in New Orleans the future doesn't exist.”
― Dan Baum, Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans

“It is a lesson of the sixties: liberals get in the biggest political trouble - whether instituting open housing, civilian compliant review boards, or sex education programs - when they presume that a reform is an inevitable comcomitant of progress. It is then they are most likely to establish their reforms by top-down bureaucratic means. A blindsiding backlash often ensues.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.”
― Kate Chopin, The Awakening

“What could love, the unsolved mystery, count for in the face of this possession of self-assertion which she suddenly recognized as the strongest impulse of her being!”
― Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

“She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.”
― Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

“There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature”
― Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

“There would be no one there to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistance with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. A kind intention or a cruel intention made the act seem no less a crime as she looked upon it in that brief moment of illumination.”
― Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

“Spring days, and summer days, and all sorts of days that would be her own. She breathed a quick prayer that life might be long. It was only yesterday she had thought with a shudder that life might be long.”
― Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour

“She was able enough to estimate him—she who waited on his glances with trembling, and shut her best soul in prison, paying it only hidden visits, that she might be petty enough to please him. In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“There is a pale shade of bribery which is sometimes called prosperity.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“The mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch