⠀ ◇ ◈ ◆ progress ⠀ ✩ favored⠀ ⠀ ▶︎ audiobook

• how to know a person, david brooks ▶︎ ◆ ✩
• supercommunicators, charles duhigg ▶︎ ◈
• the conspiracy against the human race, thomas ligotti ◈
• rejection, tony tulathimutte ◆ ✩
  • "—each weathers away a thing unreclaimable layer fromt he enamel of her patience."
  • "kant feels a cold glaze ladled over his heart."
  • "The possibility that short dick passed through Julian's mind for even a nanosecond is enough to kill everything, a drop of detergent hitting the greasy surface-scum of his lust."
  • "Adding to the diffculty of collating all this information is the fact that many of the primary sources have been edited or deleted, and the many community-sourced screenshots and cached pages are beyond our means to verify."
  • " -accept second-class citizenship in exchange for a threadbare mantle of conditional whiteness-"
  • "But that was Binh's game, splaying my family's guts to petition for the validity of my grievances."
  • "Consuming horror felt like honing my mind away from the contemptible norm. In this pocket universe the world seemed to molt its civilized plumage, which it wore to hide the blood and shit, to pretend it had an essence beyond carnage. Or maybe it's just cathartic to microdose trauma, without the protective salt circle of fiction."
  • " -had yet to realize he was jabbing a straw into my navel and drinking deep to nourish his throbbing tumor of guilt."
  • " -consciousness was an accident of excitable hydrocarbons. Every stratum of self that seemed essential could be flensed away."
  • " -patrolling the ramparts of identity was the chief source of agency and dignity available to anyone like me."
  • " -which is the kind of thing you can't gainsay without seeming hostile-"
  • "It did not take long to discover she was a stormer and squatter of hearts, administering compassion like knockout gas in the air ducts of any room she entered."
  • "She was her own crisis actor, always under siege, forever waylaid by obscure and bankrupting emergencies."
  • "Fuck me, I just wanted to exist without ordering the prix fixe, be more than an infinitesimal coordinate in a million-dimensional matrix of demographics--identity, and its convenient synergy with personal branding, the caricature of you it puts in other people's heads."
  • " -a patriotism of trauma, or a prosthesis of personality."
  • "While acknowledging that they did indeed attend the same high school, @LENA_GUNDAM retaliated not by denying the bullying, but by linking to a vast trove of crossover *Cowboy Bebop* fanfiction that @lemondroppe had written in her early twenties, and laid out with impressive levels of textual support how Spike Spiegel's visits to other planets engage heavily in white savior/noble savage tropes, leading to a tiresome relitigation of Spike's ethnicity." LMAO
  • "I guess we feel responsible to the image of ourselves we've installed in other people's heads."
  • "But discourse is loneliness disguised as war. What people there really want is to be perceived on their own terms, which is so so funny. Because if the grand promise of the internet was to be whoever you want, in reality it will make of you whatever it wants, and beneath every mask is another mask mistaken for a face."