Good Lines

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 :)