Natalie

“Some people say history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.”
― Ocean Vuong, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

“People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments. Which is why, even when we’ve experienced the same events as other individuals, we never constructed identical narratives: the criteria used for selecting moments were different for each of us, and a reflection of our personalities. Each of us noticed the details that caught our attention and remembered what was important to us, and the narratives we built shaped our personalities in turn. But, I wondered, if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film. ·”
― Ted Chiang, The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling

“You boys know what tropism is, it’s what makes a plant grow toward the light. Everything aspires to the light. You don’t have to chase down a fly to get rid of it—you just darken the room, leave a crack of light in a window, and out he goes. Works every time. We all have that instinct, that aspiration. Science can’t—what was your word? dim?—science can’t dim that. All science can do is turn out the false lights so the true light can get us home.”
― Tobias Wolff, Old School

“Figuring out how to “get better” at being a woman is a ridiculous and often amoral project—a subset of the larger, equally ridiculous, equally amoral project of learning to get better at life under accelerated capitalism. In these pursuits, most pleasures end up being traps, and every public-facing demand escalates in perpetuity. Satisfaction remains, under the terms of the system, necessarily out of reach.”
― Jia Tolentino, Trick Mirror