brucklethings

[brucklethings]

“I will have you even in death, little witch. I am your beast. I am your madness. And you, you’re my afterlife.”

— RuNyx, Gothikana

[brucklethings]

“‘I remember your mum. She was a saint, that woman. Always had a helping hand for everyone.’

‘Yes, and didn’t they grab. ‘Said Glenda to herself. ‘She was lucky to die with all her fingers.’”

— Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett

[brucklethings]

“If we aren’t broken just a little how will we know if we are the perfect fit for another person?”

— My friend Sasha Lopez

[brucklethings]

“He wonders — without necessarily believing in ghosts — whether their ghosts wander. It comes to him that even if they do, even if he were to take up his coat now and go walking the back roads and the mountainsides, he wouldn’t meet them. Their lives and their deaths grew out of a land that Cal isn’t made from, and hasn’t sown, or harvested. And they’ve soaked back into that land. He could walk right through those ghosts and never feel their urgent prickle.”

— The Searcher, by Tana French

[brucklethings]

“The psychologist Daniel Wegner has this beautiful concept called transactive memory, which is the observation that we don't just store information in our minds or in specific places. We also store memories and understanding in the minds of the people we love.

You don't need to remember your child's emotional relationship to her teacher because you know your wife will; you don't have to remember how to work the remote because you know your daughter will. That’s transactive memory. Little bits of ourselves reside in other people's minds. Wegner has a heartbreaking riff about what one member of a couple will often say when the other one dies —that some part of him or her died along with the partner. That, Wegner says, is literally true. When your partner dies, everything that you have stored in that person's brain is gone.”

— Malcolm Gladwell, The Bomber Mafia

[brucklethings]

"How do we forgive our Fathers? Maybe in a dream; Do we forgive our Fathers for leaving us too often or forever when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with unexpected rage or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage there at all. Do we forgive our Fathers for marrying or not marrying our Mothers? For Divorcing or not divorcing our Mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or coldness? Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning for shutting doors for speaking through walls or never speaking or never being silent? Do we forgive our Fathers in our age or in theirs or their deaths saying it to them or not saying it? If we forgive our Fathers what is left?"

--Dick Lourie, as quoted in the film Smoke Signals

[brucklethings]

“Ultimately I must say that British and Irish people have an abundance of easy grass, and a sort of wild instinct for putting sheep on it. Any patch of green larger than a roundabout, that is more or less horizontal enough to balance on top of, seems to trigger an instinct to put a sheep on it.”

— @elodieunderglass

From this post

[brucklethings]

"The term 'to detect' derived from the Latin verb 'to unroof' -- and because the Devil, according to legend, allowed his henchman to peer voyeuristically into houses by removing their roofs, detectives were known as 'the Devil's disciples'."

-- David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon

[brucklethings]

"Since enforcement depends on self-reporting, and the distant threat of fines, a polluter's decision on whether to comply becomes a business calculation: what are the chances of being caught? Would paying the fine be cheaper than the cost of complying in the first place? Many waste handlers simply conclude that compliance doesn't pay."

-Dan Fagin, Toms River

[brucklethings]

"The residents of Toms River were more conflicted. They too loved the ocean, but their ire over Ciba-Geigy's discharges was tempered by their connections to the company, and its importance to the local economy. Most were not yet ready to turn on Ciba-Geigy, but they were unhappy that their town had been labeled as polluted. Reputation meant everything in Toms River, and now their community was being portrayed on television and in the newspapers as no different from Newark, Trenton, and the other run-down industrial cities they had scorned for so long."

--Dan Fagin, Toms River

[brucklethings]

"But those developments would also transform the social conditions in which environmental cancer research is conducted. Now that specific products of commerce, including the detritus of dye manufacture, had been directly implicated as causing the deadly disease the discoveries of Kennaway's successors would no longer be greeted with acclamation. As governments took their first steps toward meaningful regulation of the chemical industry, science would become both a weapon -- and a target."

-- Dan Fagin, Toms River

[brucklethings]

“Since World War II, the world has embraced the materials economy, that is to say, a wasteful, rather than regenerative, use of precious resources.”

— Elizabeth Knight & John Wackman Repair Revolution

[brucklethings]

“Human beings are never gonna be ‘perfect’, Roy. The best we can do is to keep asking for help and accepting it, when you can. And if you keep on doing that, you’ll always be moving towards ‘better’.”

Higgins in Ted Lasso

[brucklethings]

“We are showered every day with gifts, but they are not meant for us to keep. Their life is in their movement, the inhale and the exhale of our shared breath. Our work, and our joy, is to pass along the gift, and to trust that what we put out into the universe will always come back.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

[brucklethings]

“It is the fundamental unfairness of parenthood, that if we do our jobs well, the deepest bonds we are given will walk out the door with a wave over the shoulder.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

[brucklethings]

“The indigenous people understood the value of the gift to be based in reciprocity…. Many of our ancient teachings counsel that whatever we have been given, is supposed to be given away, again.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass

[brucklethings]

“As the scholar and writer Lewis Hyde notes, it is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange: that a gift establishes a feeling bond between two people…. Hyde reminds us that in a gift economy, one’s freely given gifts cannot be made into someone else’s capital.”

— Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass