28 posts tagged “excerpts”
"Sometimes I think it would be weird if there were a skyscraper that moved up and down while its elevator stayed in place. So if you wanted to go to the ninety-fifth floor, you'd just press the 95 button and the ninety-fifth floor would come to you. Also, that could be extremely useful, because if you're on the ninety-fifth floor, and a plane hits below you, the building could take you to the ground, and everyone could be safe, even if you left your birdseed shirt at home that day."
-J. Safran Foer
"Nothing has ever been finally found out.
Because there is nothing final to find out.
It's like looking for a needle that no one lost in a haystack that never was--"
-Charles Hoy Fort
the new love: Forgotten Books
"A great army of copyists was set to work perpetually multiplying copies of books."
H. G. Wells
"When you have drunk an entire bottle of white wine, coaxing a rather skittish garden spider into a clear plastic tumbler using only an old birthday card becomes more of a challenge to hand-eye coordination than it is at other times; a challenge that is not helped by a partially unclothed fiancée on the edge of hysterics, who, despite her announcement that she would wait in the kitchen, is instead leaning over your shoulder and offering advice."
N. Gaiman
"So the question arose in my mind that day: Did I choose to plant these potatoes, or did the potato make me do it?"
-M. Pollan
Then he used his frontalis, pars lateralis, to raise the outer half of his eyebrows. "That's A.U. two. It's also very hard, but it's worthless. It's not part of anything except Kabuki theater."
...
"There's is only one I can't do," he went on. "It's A.U. thirty-nine. fortunately, one of my postdocs can do it. A.U. thirty-eight is dilating the nostrils. Thirty-nine is the opposite. It's the muscle that pulls them down." He shook his head and looked at me again. "Ooh! You've got a fantastic thirty-nine. That's one of the best I've ever seen. It's genetic. There should be other members of your family who have this heretofore unknown talent. You've got it, you've got it." He laughed again. "You're in a position to flash it at people. See, you should try that in a singles bar!"
If [John Gottman] analyzes an hour of a husband and wife talking, he can predict with 95 prcent accuracy whether that couple will still be married fifteen years later. If he watches a couple for fifteen minutes, his success rate is around 90 percent.
...
He has found that he can find out much of what he needs to know just by focusing on what he calls the Four Horsemen: defensiveness, stonewalling, criticism, and contempt. Even within the Four Horsemen, in fact, there is one emotion that he considers the most important of all: contempt. If Gottman observes one or both partners in a marriage showing contempt toward the other, he considers it the single most important sign that the marriage is in trouble.
...
"It's trying to put that person on a lower plane than you. It's hierarchical."
...
"Contempt is closely related to disgust, and what disgust and contempt are about is completely rejecting and excluding someone from the community."
...
What he does, he explains, is track the ups and downs of a couple's level of positive and negative emotion, and he's found that it doesn't take very long to figure out which way the line on the graph is going. "Some go up, some go down," he says. "But once they start going down, toward negative emotion, ninety-four percent will continue going down. They start on a bad course and they can't correct it. I don't think of this as just a slice in time. It's an indication of how they view their whole relationship."
my sister and i have inherited (likely from a combination genetic and monkey-see-monkey-do channels) three traits that seem like they would create succeptibility the problem of contempt:
- judgmental tendencies
- certainty that our way of doing something is the best
- stubbornness
"And why are you screwing up your face like that, and spitting? Because I mentioned the imam? Because I mentioned a Turk? Well, you should think before you spit, because I may be Greek now, but I was practically a Turk then, and I'm not ashamed of it either, and I'm not the only one, and this country's full of people like me who came from Anatolia because we didn't have any choice in the matter. When I came here I didn't even speak Greek, didn't you know that? I still dream in Turkish sometimes. I came here because the Christians had to leave, and they thought that all Christians like me were Greek, beacuse the people who run the world never did and never will have any idea how complicated it really is, so if you call me a Turk you might think you're insulting me, but it's half true, and I am not ashamed."
"He forced the children to learn the Greek tongue that to them was like chewing stones, and he stirred up resentment in them with stories about how we Osmanlis had taken the land from the Greeks, and that the land was rightly theirs. I have heard it said that this place belongsed once to a people called Lycians, and tha the Greeks took it from them, so why did this teacher not tell the children that all land is originally stolen? Why did he not say "Let us find the Lycians, and give it back?" That schoolmaster was like too many in that time, the kind who toss water into a pan of smoking fat, so that others, as well as themselves are burned."
"Ibrahim the Mad was one of our most entertaining when he was young. It was sad that there was a smile at the corners of his lips from the moment of his birth, and from early boyhood he was a specialist in inappropriate interjections. To be precise, he perfected a repertoire of bleats that exactly mimicked the stupid comments of a goat in all its various states of mind; a goat that is surprised, a goat that is looking for its kid, a goat that is protesting, a goat that is hungry, a goat that is perplexed, a goat that is in rut. His most popular bleat, however, was that of a goat that has nothing to say. This bleat was the perfect parody of unintelligence, impty-headedness, inanity and harmlessness...
"Ibrahim used to do it quite suddenly in the middle of conversation, or at a solemn moment in a ceremony..."
