May 14 2025
” … the Founders told us that the Earth died because of greed. That was true, but they lied about whose greed was to blame. …”
“What the Leaving proved was that the Earth could sustain billions, if we simply shared resources and responsibilities in a sensible way. What it couldn’t sustain was a handful of hateful, self-important parasites, preying upon and paralyzing everyone else.
May 11 2025
“… he’d said the main character in her play was unrelatable, because she made questionable choices. At the time, he was producing a revival of Sweeney Todd, about a barber with anger-management issues who murdered his patrons.” p163
“Grief was the tax of having something precious.” p324
May 03 2025
“How could an interaction that had colored the last decade of her life have been so forgettable to him?”
from By Any Ohter Name, Jodi Picoult
Apr 14 2025
“Humans are a time-binding species, existing, in the eternal now. The future flows through them and becomes the past, but it is always the present that counts.” from “Overdrawn on the Memory Bank”
I’ve been thinking that I am UNlike my dog in this respect, in that SHE lives only in the present b/c she can’t imagine the future or remember the past (consciously). So this comment is interesting to me …
*
“When a 20th [century person] gets to talking about his ‘rights’ and what he is ‘owed’, things can get out of hand.” from “Air Raid”
Yeah. I always want to ask, ‘On what basis are you OWED such-and-such?’ The phrase ‘I owe it to myself’ in particular annoys the hell out of me.
Their response, if they could think, would have to be something like the premise ‘I am entitled to everything’ or ‘You are obligated to give me everything’. An indefensible claim if there ever was one.
Mar 14 2025
“Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. …”
…
“Men and women aren’t different species, Ruth. Women do everything men do.”
“Do they?” .. She mutters something that could be “My Lai” and looks away. “All the endless wars …” Her voice is a whisper. “All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we’re just part of the battlefields. It’ll never change unless you change the whole world. …”
…
“For Christ’s sake, Ruth, they’re aliens!” [when she asks to go with them]
“I’m used to it,” she says absently. …
from “The Women Men Don’t See,” James Tiptree, Jr.
*
“Intelligence simply hasn’t evolved there,” they reported. “Social structure is at the level of crude incubation ritual with some migratory clanning. Frankly, it looks unnestworthy. A pesky lot of mammals have clobbered up the place with broken shells. Of interest only to students of pseudo-evolution.”
from “All the Kinds of Yes,” James Tiptree, Jr.
Mar 10 2025
“Many government webpages that have the word “climate” in them have been removed in recent days, particularly at EPA, where on Jan. 27, all information about climate change was removed from its homepage and other prominent areas of its website, burying it deep in sections that are harder to find.”
I swear the States is single-handedly killing us all.
Feb 26 2025
“Is there a moral or logical justification for a creator to weild capricious power of life and death over his creations?” from “Stones of Significance”
*
“Death postponed. Metastasized cells got organized.”
“Dinosaurs return. Want their oil back.”
(both from Insistence of Vision)
fiction
