A collection of lines I liked.

  • I am the victim of a series of accidents, as are we all. –Kurt Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan

  • I would say I’m disappointed. But for that, I’d have to be surprised.

  • Admiral Rickover famously said, “you get what you INspect, not what you EXpect.”

  • “You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes” #good-lines#​​

    • From the game, NetHack https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32253691
    • A poetic, bittersweet line. In a way, the sadness is the “good” part, when you feel the most longing for what’s been lost. The real loss is forgetting.

  • “I will be the begrudging devil’s advocate.” “There are plent of devils out there, they can advocate for themselves.”

  • When reaching out to someone after they have had a loss: “Hey, I heard about the news. I don’t have the right words and please don’t feel obligated to reply. Just know that if I can do something, big or small, now or in the future, I’m just a text away.”

  • “Often, the person in the group who articulates the possible is dismissed as a dreamer or as a Pollyanna persisting in a simplistic “glass half-full” kind of optimism. The naysayers pride themselves on their supposed realism. However, it is actually the people who see the glass as “half-empty” who are the ones wedded to a fiction, for “emptiness” and “lack,” like the “wall,” are abstractions of the mind, whereas “half-full” is a measure of the physical reality under discussion. The so-called optimist, then, is the only one attending to real things, the only one describing a substance that is actually in the glass.” — The Art of Possibility (p. 110)

  • I’m already a mindless slave to the capitalist grind.

  • “The vertigo of possibility. The potential outcomes, good or bad, they are much more extreme than working a job.” <– From https://www.marginalia.nu/log/83_full_time/ <– I particularly like the phrase “vertigo of possibility” because it well describes the sensation :)

  • When you stand on the shoulders of giants, it is really hard to steer. (In the sense that if you build on top of big existing things, it can be hard to do stuff differently from them.)

  • “The magic you’re looking for is in the work you’re avoiding”. The obstacle is the way.

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