⠀ ◇ ◈ ◆ 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 thick unreclaimable layer from the 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."
• ikigai, hector garcia & francesc miralles ◆
  • "You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then--to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. (T.H. White, The One and Future King)"
  • "All things human are short-lived and perishable. - Seneca."
• lost souls, poppy z. brite ◈
• nod, adrian barnes ▶︎ ◆ ✩
  • "--thought it wonderful that the headline writer's enthusiasm had managed to poke its snout through stale newsprint and sniff my air."
  • "--a guttering cackle etching air in the absence of sense."
  • " poorly-performed pantomimes of normalcy "
  • "I can say of myself that I have no time for people until I understand them, and then I whilash all the way from contempt to pity. A shitty way to live: the worst of everything. Contempt is bad, but pity's worse. Pity's sticky: it clings to the poor fool who presumes to be in a safe enough place from whence to do the commiserating."
  • " distant, soaring cry horrified to find itself naked in the open air. "
  • "I staggered to my feet, thinking fast, hoping against hope to create some fellow-feeling."
  • "I thought of the Blemmye from the other evening and felt my ribs creak in rhythm to my throbbing head, my throbbing fucking universe."
  • " , but a name had no way of sticking to our silent ward and slid off onto the floor before being kicked into a thoughtless corner."
  • "He stared at me without blinking, like he was trying to burn away some obscuring film that concealed me."
  • " as she heaved bales of breath in and out of her chest "
  • "A plundered past--nothing but teases for my poor, pathetic memory."
  • "Emotions heaved and shuddered within me, rising and falling but unable to escape the gravitational field of my body. I was seasick with feeling as grey sea serpents of horror and mourning roiled in my gut."
  • "She paused to gather her ammunition and shot me a wild look that didn't contain an ounce of regret."
  • "The Dream was gravity, bending my thoughts in its direction so that every one of the dozens of problems I faced seemed as though they would be most easily solved through the closing of my eyes."
  • "Children were the eternal, silent witnesses to every human sin, and the more we tatter their purity, the more we extol the clean white blouses of 'innocence'."
  • "Nobody says these things--it's against the rules--but deep inside we know that we are, each of us, unknowable and ultimately alone, even when we love."
  • ", that we were going to swallow reality whole and let it inside us despite the surfeit of fantasy on offer."
  • "--felt the familiar puppet pull toward speech but forced myself to ignore it."
  • "I felt thousands of eyes swivel in their sockets, could almost hear the moist sound of that movement in the same way a million silent raindrops become a deafening torrent."
  • "Eventually, though, bemusement mouldered--inevitably--into pity."
  • "--a crude mimicry of care."
  • " All that's different here in Nod is that the molten planetary core of pain that used to roil away behind our placid smiles has now blurped out into open air."
  • "But that colorful cavalcade of emotions was just a sham."
  • "But tell that to those flayed faces down there, freshly-arrived for the night shift, insomniac suns thrust deep inside their pockets, scorching their thighs."