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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 96ded17 | Cultural traits, however, are a more general category than memes, because they also include quantitative (smoothly-varying) characteristics that cannot be easily represented as discrete alternatives: for example, the inclination to trust strangers. (More on that below.) | Peter Turchin | ||
| 0596916 | In fact, the most important influence predicting a person's level of generalized trust is the attitude of his parents.84 And that would make generalized trust a culturally transmitted trait. Lorenzo | Peter Turchin | ||
| 934fb91 | Humans are uniquely good throwers. No other species even comes close. Monkeys and apes can throw branches, rotten fruit, and excrement (I still remember an encounter with an irate troop of howler monkeys in Costa Rica . . .), but they do not use projectiles as lethal weapons in hunting or combat. Our closest relatives, chimpanzees, are quite pathetic at throwing.94 Imagine | Peter Turchin | ||
| 7a4b497 | Our behavior and decisions are based on a mixture of calculation, emotions, and internalized norms, with calculation often a minor component of the cocktail. | Peter Turchin | ||
| a84d724 | The worst mistake you can make, Kroeber taught, is to see another person through the lens of your prejudices. And the second-worst mistake is to think you aren't looking though the lens of your prejudices. | prejudice | Paul La Farge | |
| 1cd0244 | See there," he said. "The ants are drawing up and closing their doors. A book ain't the only thing there is to read. We best get going if we're going to." | Chris Offutt | ||
| d5a1f87 | the Asian War Complex, appeared in Alaska. It spread rapidly through the continent--east to Greenland and south to California and the American southwest. The central innovation of the package was the recurved bow, backed with sinew. This was a much more powerful weapon than the wooden self bow already known to the Native Americans, and came with body armor often made from slats of wood or bone. Clearly, it wasn't just a hunting tool: it was.. | Peter Turchin | ||
| 0acdb69 | These windows were dedicated to the patron saints of the guilds and often showed the donors at work: furriers displaying a fur robe, money-changers testing their coin, butchers killing oxen. Even the common laborers, who somehow managed to pool their meager resources, donated a window, which was dedicated to Adam, "who first dug the earth by the sweat of his brow."5" | Peter Turchin | ||
| c3cac60 | Malthusian-Ricardian theory predicted that an increasing population would result in a specific progression of effects. Rents would rise first, with grain prices lagging behind rents, the price of industrial goods lagging behind grain prices, and workers' wages bringing up the rear. The evidence showed that this was precisely what happened (until the whole system was dramatically changed in the nineteenth century). | Peter Turchin | ||
| d09e23c | Again, the uncertainty in the estimate pales into insignificance when we look at the overall trend. Over the 11,000 years separating Gobekli Tepe from the International Space Station, the scale of cooperation, when measured by the labor costs of the most impressive building project, went up by four orders of magnitude--from 300 to 3,000,000. This is a huge--indeed, an astronomic--increase. And, of course, it was paralleled by an equally eno.. | Peter Turchin | ||
| fa66d2a | Science and philosophy have for centuries been sustained by unquestioning faith in perception. Perception opens a window on to things. This means that it is directed, quasi-teleologically, towards a *truth in itself* in which the reason underlying all appearances is to be found. The tacit thesis of perception is that at every instant experience can be co-ordinated with that of the previous instant and that of the following, and my perspecti.. | philosophy phenomenology | Maurice Merleau-Ponty | |
| 6ad36bb | This intense bastard made Siri his bitch | L.J. Shen | ||
| e41bb5e | In his mature works from Ideas I, notably the Cartesian Meditations (1931), Husserl presented his approach as a radicalization of Descartes' project that sought to return knowledge to a foundation in the certainty of subjective experience (cogito ergo sum). | Dermot Moran | ||
| 36a4ba6 | transcendental phenomenology as a science of pure essential possibilities of knowing | Dermot Moran | ||
| 6e9e54c | not just every object but the whole culturally experienced world is an 'achievement' of what he terms 'anonymous' or 'functioning subjectivity'. | Dermot Moran | ||
| 0775d8d | As a Freudian, I'm not supposed to use words like evil; my business is with instinct, memory, and desire. Nevertheless, I've been wondering, lately, whether evil might exist. If it does, I've been thinking, it might be like what Freud called the navel of the dream, the place where all the lines of meaning the analyst has so carefully traced through the patient's life vanish into the unknown. But where the navel of the dream is essentially h.. | freudian evil | Paul La Farge | |
| 51dd7c4 | Still writing tales?" he said. I told him yes and he nodded once, returning his attention to the snake. Very few of the boys I grew up with had finished high school, but they accepted that I was a writer. I was merely doing what other men did--following in my father's footsteps. Sonny was a plumber. The son of a local drunk was the town drunk in two towns. Sons of soldiers joined the army. That I had become a writer was perfectly normal." | Chris Offutt | ||
| ddbd2a4 | The desktop held a patina of hieroglyphs representing years of student boredom--names and initials gouged into the wood, blackened by grime and pencil, shellacked over, then cobwebbed again with another generation's imprint. | Chris Offutt | ||
| 576abc0 | Time piles up like brush. You burn it in the fall and all you remember are the glowing cinders. I got ash heaps everywhere I look. -Old of the Moon | Chris Offutt | ||
| cea306d | Most grandiose gestures are suspect--the couple who renew their vows just before divorce or the politician who publicly swears he's clean, then enters rehab. Building | Chris Offutt | ||
| 755782b | Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within | Chris Offutt | ||
| 33e4c79 | If you've used adverbs, look at them carefully. Adverbs are the weakest words; verbs are the strongest. Many, many times I've found that I have the wrong verb so I'm attempting to cheat and modify the wrong verb by using an adverb. | Chris Offutt | ||
| 7ae31ff | At the time I wasn't even sure what she meant--what does anyone do? We mark time until we die. She was still waiting for an answer. My roommate filled the silence. "He's a writer," he said. "Oh," she said. "What does he write about?" "His dick." She gave me a sharp look and said, "That sounds like pornography." "No," my roommate said. "If he writes about other people's dicks, it's porn. But if it's his own, it's art." | Chris Offutt | ||
| 9756d79 | He left and I wished I could go somewhere and start all over, which is how I've felt all my life. As soon as I get somewhere, I'm ready to leave. | Chris Offutt | ||
| 7ef1d15 | When I couldn't see the land out there, I forgot I wasn't at home. Sometimes I wished it was always night. | Chris Offutt | ||
| 5226e46 | My car contained guns, bundles of cash I'd found hidden about the house, and boxes of vintage pornography. If I got pulled over and searched, I'd probably go to jail. If I had a wreck, money and porn would litter the interstate, mixed with my funeral suit, my grandfather's rifle, a shotgun, three hundred rounds of ammunition, the remnants of my father's ashes, and whatever was left of me. | Chris Offutt | ||
| ad4d7a2 | Reading wasn't an attempt to educate myself. It was my chief escape from a world that, although gorgeous in landscape and rich with mountain culture, didn't provide what I needed--the promise of adventure, a life beyond the perimeter of hills. I often fantasized that I'd been adopted and had mysterious powers such as flying or teleportation. Books offered the promise of a world in which misfits like me could flourish. Within the pages of a .. | science-fiction memoir | Chris Offutt | |
| 2c65fe2 | Vaughn nodded. Lije steaded himself and looked into the woods. "Never could abide no roof." "Ours ain't the best," Vaughn said. "Leaks come spring." Lije pointed at Venus faint above the distant ridge. "only roof-hole I ever did crave." "Evening star ain't a hole." "Then how's that light get through?" | Chris Offutt | ||
| cace325 | The state called it recidivism, but as the old cons said, Baker was doing life on the installment plan. | Chris Offutt | ||
| 7e76afe | I'd forced myself to interact with so much pornography, I no longer regarded my wife in a sexual manner. Each time I tried, my mind filled with images of fetish porn. I could admire her dress, legs and hips, but the response was aesthetic and intellectual, as if studying art I couldn't afford. | Chris Offutt | ||
| 1bf5fa7 | He demanded to know what I could learn from him, since my subject matter of Kentucky was unfathomably different from his--wealthy people on the East Coast. I became angry. Here was one more older man presenting himself as an obstacle. | Chris Offutt | ||
| e8a1099 | And when Deirdre Bair went to interview Beckett for the biography the first thing he said was, 'So you've come to demonstrate that it was all, after all, autobiographical. | Tim Parks | ||
| 2042df3 | She turned, pasting a brilliant smile on her face. She was going to charm this man until - until - well, until he was charmed. She opened her mouth to slay him with something utterly witty and sophisticated, but before she could form even a sound, he leaned in closer, his eyes warm and dangerous, and said, "I find myself unbearably curious about that smile." She blinked. If she didn't know better, she'd think that he was trying to charm her.. | Julia Quinn | ||
| 76a1782 | But from the mocking curve of his smile, she was fairly certain she'd not been able to mask her first flash of surprise. "Forgive me," he said smoothly, and she shivered, because his voice -- it wasn't what she'd thought it would be. It sounded like the smell of brandy, and it felt like the taste of chocolate. And she wasn't so certain why she'd shivered, because now she felt rather warm." | Julia Quinn | ||
| 1787d45 | Your eyes," he murmured. "They're blue. I thought they might be, given your coloring, but it was difficult to tell from so far away." She froze, but he had to admire her adherence to purpose as she said, "I'm sure I don't know what you are talking about." He leaned in just enough so that she would notice. "Mine are brown." She looked as if she were about to make a retort, but instead she blinked, and almost appeared to be peering at him mor.. | Julia Quinn | ||
| 2b12ac6 | I shall be delighted to see you again this evening." "Will you?" (chuckles) "How tart! Positively lemonish of you." "Lemonish; really." | Julia Quinn | ||
| 9639cd7 | In the end, it was the little details of the wedding that Daphne remembered. There were tears in her mother's eyes (and then eventually on her face), and Anthony's voice had been oddly hoarse when he stepped forward to give her away. Hyacinth had strewn her rose petals too quickly, and there were none left by the time she reached the altar. Gregory sneezed three times before they even got to their vows. And she remembered the look of concen.. | love | Julia Quinn | |
| 877863b | George" she practically squealed, and once again he shushed her. "You never learn, do you?" he murmured against her skin. "You're the one who's making me scream." "That wasn't a scream," he said with a cocktail smile. she eyed him with alarm. "I didn't mean it as a dare." He laughed aloud--although more quietly than she'd done--at that. "Merely planning for the future, when volume is not an issue." "George, there are servants!" "Who work f.. | george-rokesby sybilla-bridgerton blush noise | Julia Quinn | |
| 81cab7e | She felt his hands move to the fastening of his breeches, and then he swore under his breath as he was forced to roll off her in order to (in his words), "get the bloody things off." She couldn't help but chuckle at his profanity; he seemed to be having a much rougher time of it than she imagined was usual. "You're laughing?" he asked, his brows rising into a daring arch. "You should be glad I was already out of my gown," she told him. "Thi.. | get-the-bloody-thing-off george-rokesby sybilla-bridgerton clothing buttons | Julia Quinn | |
| a5a749f | I like Lord Hugh very much. It's true that he can be a little eccentric, but he's terribly clever. And he's a very good shot." All eyes swung back to Frances. "He shot Cousin Daniel in the shoulder," Sarah reminded her. "He's a very good shot when he's sober," Frances clarified. "Daniel said so." | Julia Quinn | ||
| fdbb25e | You looked lonely." Hugh smiled again. It was the sort of thing an adult would never have said aloud. And precisely the reason he'd rather have been chatting with her than anyone else in the room. "I was alone, not lonely." Frances frowned, considering that. Hugh was just about to explain the difference when she cocked her head and asked, "Are you sure?" "Alone is a state of being," he explained, "whereas lonely is--" "I know that," she cut.. | Julia Quinn | ||
| a7bf618 | Eu te amo - disse ele, a voz enfim mais alta que um suspiro. Ele se virou, o coracao, a propria alma nos olhos. - Eu te amo. | Julia Quinn | ||
| 7afac1f | Bilirsin,askin insanin karsisina ne zaman cikacagi belli olmaz. | eloise-bridgerton phillip-crane | Julia Quinn | |
| 2ca11b0 | Tesadufler.Her sey tesaduflerden ibaretti.Hicbir bilim insani kabullenmese de en buyuk icatlar,birileri tamamiyla bambaska bir sorunu cozmeye calisirken ortaya cikardi. | eloise-bridgerton phillip-crane | Julia Quinn |