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“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Tell me what you can't forget, and I'll tell you who you are. I switch off my apartment light and she comes with the dark.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Have you ever tried to demarcate the hours between the moment you thought you'd never fall asleep and the instant after opening your eyes, your bedroom flooded with the befuddling, sugary pink of dawn? Between point A and point B you exist, you are alive, your breath slowing, your body temperature dropping, the shadows cast by your furniture elongating and shrinking as the moon revolves through the sky above your flimsy house, if that's even where you really are. Every night, anything could happen, and you would never be the wiser. What I'm trying to say is that day, I learned that time doesn't belong to you. All you have is what you remember. A fraction; less.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“I want to go home, I want to go home, but what I mean, what I'm grasping for, is not a place, it's a feeling.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“I’ve never believed in the idea of an innocent bystander. The act of watching changes what happens. Just because you don’t touch anything doesn’t mean you are exempt.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“Tell what you can't forget, and I'll tell you who you are.”
― Julie Buntin, Marlena

“When people have this feeling of personal inefficiency, compulsive collecting helps them in feeling better.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

“She said she had sympathy for the fish, then. Sympathy for the idea that once you name something, you tend to stop looking at it.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

“People who say change is impossible are usually pretty happy with things just as they are.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“This is the lesson: Great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Innocence is nothing but a ceremony, after all.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“I get on the train to go home every day, and sometimes I look around and see all these people glowing. Filled with the beauty of this city.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Manny’s been in New York for less than an hour and yet he knows, he knows, that cities are organic, dynamic systems. They are built to incorporate newness. But some new things become part of a city, helping it grow and strengthen—while some new things can tear it apart.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Libraries are safe places. They're warm in the winter. Nobody cares if you stay all day as long as you're not eyeballing the kids' corner or trying to hit up porn on the computers.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The City We Became

“Time heals all. But what if time itself is the disease?”
― Margarita Montimore, Oona Out of Order

“It felt as if my whole life had been shaped by the things people wouldn't say.”
― Margarita Montimore, Oona Out of Order

“Dogs and books, two excellent defenses against solitude and despair.”
― Margarita Montimore, Oona Out of Order

“When I was growing up, Mama used to say what you dislike in other people is really what you dislike in yourself.”
― Margarita Montimore, Oona Out of Order

“find a good book. And sit down and read it. There will be times in your life when you'll feel lost and confused. The way back to yourself is through reading. I want you to remember that. The more you read, the more you will know how to find your way through those difficult times.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“I sometimes feel like my head is a computer with too many windows open. Too much clutter on the desktop. There is a metaphorical spinning rainbow wheel inside me. Disabling me. And if only I could find a way to switch off some of the frames, if only I could drag some of the clutter into the trash, then I would be fine. But which frame would I choose, when they all seem so essential? How can I stop my mind being overloaded when the world is overloaded? We can think about anything. And so it makes sense that we end up thinking about everything. We might have to, sometimes, be brave enough to switch the screens off in order to switch ourselves back on. To disconnect in order to reconnect.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“We often find ourselves wishing for more hours in the day, but that wouldn't help anything. The problem, clearly, isn't that we have a shortage of time. It's more that we have an overload of everything else.”
― Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet

“We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell's dark vision, there was another - slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley's vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny "failed to take into account man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." In 1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we desire will ruin us.

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“[M]ost of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. (68).”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“I am still waiting for the happiness I chose to kick in.”
― Emily R. Austin, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead

“I start to picture a world where Jesus had been killed using a different murder device. I picture little ceramic guillotine figurines. I imagine miniature nooses hung above children's beds. Electric chair necklaces and earrings.”
― Emily Austin, Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead