#esp

How nice it would be to be dead if only we could know we were dead. That is what I hate, the not being able to turn round in the grave and to say It is over. ↗

— Edward Thomas

#despair #dying #ennui #life #death

By exiling human judgment in the last few decades, modern law changed role from useful tool to brainless tyrant. This legal regime will never be up to the job, any more than the Soviet system of central planning was, because ti can't think. The comedy of law's sterile logic--large POISON signs warning against common sand, spending twenty-two years on pesticide review and deciding next to nothing, allowing fifty-year-old white men to sue for discrimination--is all too reminiscent of the old jokes we used to hear about life in the Eastern bloc. Judgement is to law as water is to crops. It should not be surprising that law has become brittle, and society along with it. ↗

— Philip K. Howard

#bureaucrats #human-judgment #law #regulation #responsibility

He had a respect for facts maybe this was one. ↗

— Anne Carson

#fictions #respect

Respect Death and You Live In Life ↗

— Christopher Thames

#death

In your big mind, everything has the same value...In your practice you should accept everything as it is, giving to each thing the same respect given to a Buddha. Here there is Buddhahood ↗

— Shunryu Suzuki

#respect #zen #respect

Was that what it was really like to be alive? The feeling of darkness dragging you forward? How could they live with it? And yet they did, and even seemed to find enjoyment in it, when surely the only sensible course would be to despair. Amazing. To feel you were a tiny living thing, sandwiched between two cliffs of darkness. How could they stand to be alive? ↗

— Terry Pratchett

#death #despair #life #death

Karsky: I met your father last week. Are you still interested in hearing how he is doing? Hugo: No. Karsky: It is very probable that you will be responsible for his death. Hugo: It is virtually certain that he is responsible for my life. We are even. ↗

— Jean-Paul Sartre

#life #responsibility #death

She turned and walked down the musty, dimly-lighted corridor, along a strip of carpeting that still clung together only out of sheer stubbornness of skeletal weave. Doors, dark, oblivious, inscrutable, sidling by; enough to give you the creeps just to look at them. All hope gone from them, and from those who passed in and out through them. Just one more row of stopped-up orifices in this giant honeycomb that was the city. Human beings shouldn't have to enter such doors, shouldn't have to stay behind them. No moon ever entered there, no stars, no anything at all. They were worse than the grave, for in the grave is absence of consciousness. And God, she reflected, ordered the grave, for all of us; but God didn't order such burrows in a third-class New York City hotel. ↗

— Cornell Woolrich

#death #despair #hopeless #loneliness #death

A jet may be perfect for breaking the speed of sound, but a brick is designed to break the speed of silence. Just listen to that quietness.
 ↗

— Jarod Kintz

#brick-and-blanket-responses #brick-and-blanket-test #brick-and-blanket-uses #design

Response is absolutely designed for always showing up late. ↗

— Toba Beta

#design