#co

Beginning with Santa Claus as a cognitive exercise, a child is encouraged to share the same idea of reality as his peers. Even if that reality is patently invented and ludicrous, belief is encouraged with gifts that support and promote the common cultural lies. The greatest consensus in modern society is our traffic systems. The way a flood of strangers can interact, sharing a path, almost all of them traveling without incident. It only takes one dissenting driver to create anarchy. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#conditioning #dissent #santa #anarchy

Jelly beans! Millions and billions of purples and yellows and greens and licorice and grape and raspberry and mint and round and smooth and crunchy outside and soft-mealy inside and sugary and bouncing jouncing tumbling clittering clattering skittering fell on the heads and shoulders and hardhats and carapaces of the Timkin works, tinkling on the slidewalk and bouncing away and rolling about underfoot and filling the sky on their way down with all the colors of joy and childhood and holidays, coming down in a steady rain, a solid wash, a torrent of color and sweetness out of the sky from above, and entering a universe of sanity and metronomic order with quite-mad coocoo newness. Jelly beans! ↗

— Harlan Ellison

#candy #grape #jelly-beans #jellybeans #licorice

Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees—which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all. ↗

— Daniel Quinn

#ecology #philosophy #diversity

tiny: did someone die? me: yeah, i did. he smiles again at that. tiny: well, then... welcome to the afterlife. ↗

— David Levithan

#afterlife

Some people say—not to my face, mind you—that I’m a cowardly son of a bitch. And that is simply not true. My mom is not a bitch.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#coward #cowardly #gossip #mom #mother

A session of boasting won't attract any real friends.  It will set you up on a pedestal, however, making you a clearer target. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#bragging #conceit #gossip #haughty #pride

I find her anecdotes more efficacious than sheep-counting, rain on a tin roof, or alanol tablets.... you will find me and Morpheus, off in a corner, necking. ↗

— Dorothy Parker

#counting-sheep #humour #boredom

I’ve always seen you, angel. From the moment you found me, I’ve seen nothing but you. ↗

— Sylvia Day

#gideon-cross #angels

...You'd think the little part about them supposedly killing us would be the attention getter. ↗

— James Dashner

#the-scorch-trials-humour #trials

Yeah, right," Minho said. "And Frypan's gonna start having little babies, Winston'll get rid of his monster acne, and Thomas here'll actually smile for once." Thomas turned to Minho and exaggerated a fake smile. "There, you happy?" "Dude," he responded. "You are one ugly shank. ↗

— James Dashner

#the-scorch-trials #you-are-one-ugly-shank #trials