Some Quotes for June 2025 (#38)
Cate Hall, Gwern, Anaïs Nin, Peter Godfrey-Smith, Ezra Klein, William Carlos Williams, Chet Collins, Kathryn Schulz, Naomi Shihab Nye
Link = source I've actually read/endorse. No link = random, out-of-context snippet I stumbled on, usually online. (Some of these are advice—others I just enjoy the language or sentiment.)
From “Are You Stuck in Movie Logic?”: [O]ver time, hopeful silence has corrosive effects. If you don’t name the real problems in your life, you eventually become alienated from your inner compass. You stop paying attention to your life on an experiential level, because you want to live in a pretend world of self-consolation. You lose the ability to see your life honestly. –Cate Hall
The average of many good plans is often a bad plan, and a bad plan followed to the end is often both more rewarding and informative than switching at every timestep between many good plans. –Gwern
We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. –Anaïs Nin
From Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness: Philosophers often use the metaphor of a stream of experience. Experience, they say, is something like a river in which we are immersed. This image is quite misleading, though, as the flow in a river is almost entirely outside our control. We might change our location within the river, swimming to one spot or another, and that gives us some control over what we’ll encounter. But in real life we can usually do much more than that; we can reshape the things themselves that we interact with. Rivers are rather resistant to such efforts when we’re alone in the middle of them. –Peter Godfrey-Smith
From How I Write, “The Case Against Writing with AI”: What changes you isn’t the wave. It’s the erosion. –Ezra Klein
From “A Sort of Song”: No ideas but in things. –William Carlos Williams
From Almost Friday TV, “Professor has MENTAL BREAKDOWN and accuses class of cheating”1: I want you to remember that in the real world, there aren’t magical other people that just skip around giving you the answers to your problems. It doesn’t work that way. The truth is earned—it’s not gifted to you. There are problems in your life that you’re going to need to learn how to wrestle with yourself. –Chet Collins
Happiness routinely gets not only less attention but also more criticism than its opposite number. Contemporary thinkers sometimes dismiss it as a shallow fixation of modern life, but to condemn it on those grounds is to mistake it for proximate but different phenomena—either superficial forms of itself, like amusement and pleasure, or superficial means of trying to achieve it, from substance abuse to so-called retail therapy.2 –Kathryn Schulz
From “Supple Cord”:
I missed him terribly, though I could hear his even breath and we had such long and separate lives ahead.
–Naomi Shihab Nye
If you watch (which you should), watch to the end!
This excerpt is from Schulz’s memoir Lost & Found, which I assume is excellent but am not linking above since I have not read it.
Love the Chet Collins quote!