Rachel > Rachel's Quotes

“What do we mean by "knowledge" or "understanding"? And how do billions of neurons achieve them? These are complete mysteries. Admittedly, cognitive neuroscientists are still very vague about the exact meaning of words like "understand," "think," and indeed the word "meaning" itself.”
― V. S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: Unlocking the Mystery of Human Nature

“Indeed, the line between perceiving and hallucinating is not as crisp as we like to think. In a sense, when we look at the world, we are hallucinating all the time. One could almost regard perception as the act of choosing the one hallucination that best fits the incoming data.”
― V.S. Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

“You know, I'm really starting to think the whole world is just a patchwork quilt of crazy little cults, all with their own secret spaces, their own records, their own rules.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“Your mind will answer most questions if you learn to relax and wait for the answer.”
― William S. Burroughs

“But I kept at it with the help-wanted ads. My standards were sliding swiftly. At first I had insisted I would only work at a company with a mission I believed in. Then I thought maybe it would be fine as long as I was learning something new. After that I decided it just couldn't be evil. Now I was carefully delineating my personal definition of evil.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

“Mom says each of us has a veil between ourselves and the rest of the world, like a bride wears on her wedding day, except this kind of veil is invisible. We walk around happily with these invisible veils hanging down over our faces. The world is kind of blurry, and we like it that way. But sometimes our veils are pushed away for a few moments, like there's a wind blowing it from our faces. And when the veil lifts, we can see the world as it really is, just for those few seconds before it settles down again. We see all the beauty, and cruelty, and sadness, and love. But mostly we are happy not to. Some people learn to lift the veil themselves. Then they don't have to depend on the wind anymore.”
― Rebecca Stead, When You Reach Me

“After that, the book will fade, the way all books fade in your mind. But I hope you will remember this:
A man walking fast down a dark lonely street. Quick steps and hard breathing, all wonder and need. A bell above a door and the tinkle it makes. A clerk and a ladder and warm golden light, and then: the right book exactly, at exactly the right time.”
― Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

“Say what you will about the sweet miracle of unquestioning faith, I consider a capacity for it terrifying and absolutely vile.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

“Entertainments nearly always end with triumph or disaster—happiness achieved, or total, tragic defeat precluding any hope of it. But there is always more after the ending—always the next morning and the next, always changes, losses and gains. Always one step after the other. Until the one true ending that none of us can escape. But even that ending is only a small one, large as it looms for us. There is still the next morning for everyone else. For the vast majority of the rest of the universe, that ending might as well not ever have happened. Every ending is an arbitrary one. Every ending is, from another angle, not really an ending.”
― Ann Leckie, Ancillary Mercy

“Travel changes you. As you move through this life and this world you change things slightly, you leave marks behind, however small. And in return, life—and travel—leaves marks on you.”
― Anthony Bourdain

“We like to think we have some semblance of control over our lives or that some greater power has control over them. That we can make sense of whatever happens to us. That there is some greater purpose to it all, a reason for all the suffering and pain, something to justify the imbalances we see every day in the world around us. We want to feel safe, secure against every eventuality, so we construct worlds of illusion into which we bury our heads like the proverbial ostrich.

But then something totally random, something for which we are totally unprepared, is thrown into the mix, and we suddenly realize that for all its laws, for all its order, the universe is full of chaos, and all our carefully laid plans are useless.”
― Juliana Buhring, This Road I Ride: Sometimes It Takes Losing Everything to Find Yourself

“The more people I have met from different backgrounds and cultures, and the more I have listened to them speak about the things that are important to them, the more I realize that while we may differ in some of the details, we are all fundamentally connected. We are all here, just trying to figure it out, trying to find a purpose, in pursuit of happiness. Yet instead of focusing on our commonalities, we look at our differences. We segregate, we judge, we assume. We live in a world of "us and them." We are riddled with prejudices and moral superiority, separated by religion, race, belief, color, social status, wealth, poverty.”
― Juliana Buhring

“We can do things that are greater than ourselves. If you believe nothing exists beyond a certain boundary, then you will never test the veracity of that belief and you will never discover new possibilities....Maybe there are truly extraordinary people out there, but I'm not one of them. The most extraordinary acts are accomplished by ordinary people doing something a little extra and stepping ouiside their personal comfort zone....I often wonder how much human potential lies unrealized and untapped, how much we are limited by our own fears as well as by social, cultural, religious, and self-imposed limitations. If we can break through those, how far might we go as individuals, as a species?”
― Juliana Buhring, This Road I Ride: Sometimes It Takes Losing Everything to Find Yourself

“Early in the year, I had tried to explain to Helen that science is always changing. To which she asked, “You mean that this stuff is wrong?” “Some of it.” “Then why am I learning it?” Because the state says you have to, I thought. But what I said was “Science is a way of answering questions about the world around us. What you are learning is our current understanding of the universe. As we learn more, our understanding changes.” “I still hate it.”
― Gregory Berns, How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain

“Eventually, I came to the conclusion that the key to improving dog-human relationships is through social cognition, not behaviorism. Positive reinforcement is a shortcut to train dogs, but it is not necessarily the best way to form a relationship with them. To truly live with dogs, humans need to become “great leaders.” Not dictators who rule by doling out treats and by threatening punishment, but leaders who respect and value their dogs as sentient beings.”
― Gregory Berns, How Dogs Love Us: A Neuroscientist and His Adopted Dog Decode the Canine Brain

“And we mustn't lose our sense of humor," Mrs. Which said. "The only way to cope with something deadly serious is to try to treat it a little lightly.”
― Madeleine L'Engle

“You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible measure to postpone it. Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

“There is no such thing as 'your truth'. There is the truth and your opinion.”
― Ben Shapiro

“As I sat by my mother's side and held her hand and watched her, I remember thinking, I'm going to do this too, some day. This is what dying looks like. This is what Dad looked like when he died, and what I'm going to look like, too. Like Mom and Dad. It was comforting to know what I would look like. It made death a little less frightening, a little more intimate, a little more dear.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Face

“Later on, I asked her [her mother], "How does it feel?"

"What?"

"When you can't remember things. Does it frighten you? Do you feel sad?"

"Well, not really. I have this condition, you see. It's called osteo...ost..."

"You mean Alzheimer's?" I said, helping her out.

She looked astonished. "Yes! How on earth did you know that?"

"Just a guess..."

"I can never remember the name," she explained.

"Of course not."

"It affects my memory..."

"...And that's why you can't remember"?"

She frowned and shook her head. "Remember what?"

"There's not a single thing I can do about it," she told me when I reminded her. "If there was something I could do and wasn't doing it, then I could feel sad or depressed. But as it is..." She shrugged.

"So you're okay with it?"

She looked at me, patiently. "I don't have much choice," she explained. "So I may as well be happy.”
― Ruth Ozeki, The Face

“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
― Isaac Asimov

“Neuroscience tells us that it is highly improbable that we have souls, as everything we think and feel is no more or no less than the electrochemical chatter of our nerve cells. Our sense of self, our feelings and our thoughts, our love for others, our hopes and ambitions, our hates and fears all die when our brains die. Many people deeply resent this view of things, which not only deprives us of life after death but also seems to downgrade thought to mere electrochemistry and reduces us to mere automata, to machines. Such people are profoundly mistaken, since what it really does is upgrade matter into something infinitely mysterious that we do not understand. There are one hundred billion nerve cells in our brains. Does each one have a fragment of consciousness within it? How many nerve cells do we require to be conscious or to feel pain? Or does consciousness and thought reside in the electrochemical impulses that join these billions of cells together? Is a snail aware? Does it feel pain when you crush it underfoot? Nobody knows.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

“...as I read it [magazine with gloomy predictions about what was going to happen to the planet], I wondered whether becoming a doctor, healing myself by healing others, might not be a little self-indulgent. There might be more important ways of trying to make the world a better place - admittedly less glamorous ones - than by being a surgeon. I have never entirely escaped the view that being a doctor is something of a moral luxury, by which doctors are easily corrupted. We can so easily end up complacent and self-important, feeling ourselves to be more important than our patients.”
― Henry Marsh, Admissions: Life as a Brain Surgeon

“...most folks get locked into some idea of what they think gender is supposed to be about, so they put on gender-performances for each other. They act out who they think they have to be. And most of the time, they end up not knowing the difference between the mask they're wearing and who they really are. Charles, a real man doesn't worry what kind of underwear he's wearing, what color it is, or if there's a little lace on the bottom, because he knows he's not his underwear. It doesn't mean anything.

"What you're finding out is that you are not the mask. Because when you can put on one gender-performance, and then take it off and put on another, and then take that one off too, that's when you start to realize how much of what you think is really you is just a performance. And when you can recognize it as a performance, it loses all of its power. That's when you can see the difference clearly between role and real - in yourself and everyone else.”
― David Gerrold, Bouncing Off the Moon

“If I have learned anything as a mother, it's that your dreams are also your children's dreams. They need to know that your hopes and your dreams are achievable and not to be set aside. It's like they say: If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.”
― Mimi Pond, The Customer is Always Wrong

“That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Because people who couldn’t imagine themselves capable of evil were at a major disadvantage in dealing with people who didn’t need to imagine, because they already were.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral

“Nice people made the best Nazis. My mom grew up next to them. They got along, refused to make waves, looked the other way when things got ugly and focused on happier things than “politics.” They were lovely people who turned their heads as their neighbors were dragged away. You know who weren’t nice people? Resisters.”
― Naomi Shulman

“It has been said that to teach is to touch the future. Helping students to see the past more clearly, to understand and communicate with others more fully in the present, and to imagine the future more justly is to transform the world.

There is nothing more hopeful than that. I started this book with the questions, Is it better? My answer is: Not yet, but it could be. It's up to us to make sure it is. I remain hopeful.”
― Beverly Daniel Tatum, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?