Some Quotes for October 2025 (#42)

Link = source I've actually read/endorse. No link = random, out-of-context snippet I stumbled on, usually online. (Some of these are advice—others I just enjoy the language or sentiment.)

From “Thank You for Being Annoying”: I think annoyance, like cholesterol, has a good kind and a bad kind. The bad kind makes you want to flee: backed-up traffic, crying babies on planes, colleagues who say they can use Excel when really they mean they’ve heard of Excel. But the good kind of annoyance draws you in rather than driving you away. It’s that feeling you get when there’s something you can and must make right, the way some people feel when they see a picture frame that’s just a bit askew, except a lot more and all the time…The right job for you, then, is the one that puts you in charge of the things that annoy you. –Adam Mastroianni

Men more often require to be reminded than informed. –Samuel Johnson

Objective sex differences may exist, but our value judgements about them are highly subjective. Women may have better fine motor skills and men may have better gross motor skills but we rarely use that information to say that women should be brain surgeons and men should do the vacuuming. Instead, we say that women should do embroidery and men should drive trucks. Our science gets filtered through a prism of culture and socialization. –Darby Saxbe

From The Mezzanine: We begin, perhaps, with a brain that is much too crowded with pure processing capacity, and therefore the death of the brain cells is part of a planned and necessary winnowing that precedes the move upward to higher levels of intelligence:...With fewer total cells, but more connections between each cell, the quality of your knowledge undergoes a transformation: you begin to have a feel for situations, people fall into types, your past memories link together, and your life begins to seem, as it hadn’t when you were younger, an inevitable thing composed of a million small failures and successes dependently intergrown, as opposed to a bright beadlike row of unaffiliated moments. –Nicholson Baker

When you strike at a king, you must kill him. –Ralph Waldo Emerson

Not knowing when the Dawn will come, / I open every Door. –Emily Dickinson

From “Phantasia”: As they travelled, the terrain kept changing, so her sense of alien newness persisted. It was as if, for the first time, she was seeing not through the cluttered, obscuring scrim of her visual memories but directly, at the world itself. Just looking at it was so demanding that it occupied her whole mind, so that she wasn’t thinking about anything else, she was just there. –Larissa MacFarquhar

Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power. –Oscar Wilde

From “How I Read”: Good books are compressed thoughts. They are like soda cans left in a hot car: when you open them, the content explodes from their container, spraying and spraying—pouring out much more than it seems reasonable a little can like that could possibly contain. In seven hours, I can read a book of thoughts that someone spent two years thinking. There are few ways of spending seven hours that can compete with that. –Henrik Karlsson

It’s difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. –Danish proverb

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