La Crosse County Library > Books: unashamed-bookworm‎ (112)

“Who said you can’t/Wear a flower crown/& still remain/A fearsome thing?”

“When they drag you through hell/Do not simply accept it/Do not just give in/Go on & reign over the very flames that were meant to be your end/Wear them as a crown”

“There came/A time/When/Poetry/Showed me/How to/Bleed/Without/The demand/Of blood”

“Make words/Your finest weapons/A gold-hilted sword/To cut your/Enemies down”

“She wanted this. And I wanted her to have it. I wanted her to be happy. But now that I have it, I realize that she’s happy and I’m not. Her happiness came at the cost of mine. I feel robbed and exploited.”

“Mom didn’t get better. But I will.”

“‘What is a game?’" Marx said. "‘It's tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It's the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.’”

“…[S]pecies of hyperintelligent octopus…”

“…[S]pecies of hyperintelligent octopus…”

"That was one of the keys, Ha knew, to understanding them. That lack of control from the center, that feedback from limbs, that pure embodiment of mind. They were not trapped in a skull, controlling everything from behind a sheath of bone. They were free-flowing, through the entire body. Not a ladder--a ring. A neural ring moving signals from limb to limb to mind, back again. A distribution loop through the whole body. A whole consciousness that could become parts, and then whole again. A whole consciousness that could become parts, and then whole again. It was one of the many problems Ha felt she would have no time to solve."

"It was easier to pretend that Altantsetseg was an individual, that all of her choices were her own, than to admit that Altantsetseg was a part of them. That all of them were, in fact, bound together so tightly that they formed a single entity, incapable of functioning--incapable of surviving--without all of its interlocking parts in place."

“Choosing to be curious is choosing to be vulnerable because it requires us to surrender to uncertainty. We have to

“Choosing to be curious is choosing to be vulnerable because it requires us to surrender to uncertainty. We have to ask questions, admit to not knowing, risk being told that we shouldn't be asking, and, sometimes, make discoveries that lead to discomfort.”

"I want this book to be an atlas for all of us, because I believe that, with an adventurous heart and the right maps, we can travel anywhere and never fear losing ourselves."

"Turns out the oceans regulate temperatures and are too big to push around weather-wise. So, when the West and East Coast landscapes try to act up, the Pacific and Atlantic usually quickly put them back in check...In Sioux Falls and Steubenville, however, it's come what may...Sans oceans in the Midwest, it gets extra hot in the summer and extra cold every spring, fall, and winter, and the weather just kinda does whatever it wants all day long. No telling what tomorrow--or the next hour--will bring."

"2,462,000 BCE to 650,000--On the Rocks: Giant glaciers say, 'Let me squeeze right past you der' and move over a continent, flattening every mountain in their path, creating thousands of lakes of various sizes, and establishing a chill in the air that's still freezing pipes and hearts today."

“The immune system is the most complex biological system known to humanity, other than the human brain.”

“The immune system is the most complex biological system known to humanity, other than the human brain.”

“An antigen is a piece of an enemy that your immune system can recognize.”

“The best way to kill a lot of viruses is to destroy infected cells, and the viruses inside them. Let us pause for a moment to appreciate the magnitude of what we are talking about here. Your immune system needs to be able to kill your own cells. Your immune system has an actual license to kill you.”

“My ambition has long felt oppressive. It is not a joy—it is a master that I must answer to, a smoke that descends into my life, making it hard to breathe. It is only my discipline, my willingness to push myself harder, that has been my way through.

But right now, I can feel that my intuition is lacking.”

“It’s almost midnight, and the party is only just about to begin. We all have been waiting—I have been waiting—for the men’s final to end. The party can’t start until then.

The finalists were Andrew Thomas and Jadran Petrovich, neither one of whom would set a record by winning. We live in a world where exceptional women sit around waiting for mediocre men.”

“This is how a community’s corruption is measu

“This is how a community’s corruption is measured. It isn’t cheating if you don’t get caught, and it isn’t a scandal if it never gets revealed. Until then, there are just secrets. All forests are full of them.”

“One winter, two and a half years ago, Maya was raped at a party by Kevin Erdahl. The best hockey player anyone had ever seen in these parts up till then. No one uses the word ‘rape’ these days, of course, they speak of ‘the scandal’ or ‘that thing that happened’ or ‘well, you know…’ Everyone is ashamed, no one can forget. The sequence of events that started at that party eventually affected political decisions, and money was moved from one town to another. That in turn led to a spring and summer of terrible betrayals, then to an autumn and winter of violence. It started with a fight in the ice rink and almost ended with war on the streets, the men in black jackets who the police call ‘hooligans’ but who everyone in Beartown knows only as ‘the Pack’ attacked their enemies over in Hed, and the men from Hed responded by setting fire to the Bearskin pub. In their hunt for revenge the Pack lost one young man whom they loved above everything else, Vidar, in a car accident. That was the culmination of everything, the final consequence of years of aggression, after that no one could bear it any longer. Vidar was laid to rest, two men from Hed ended up in prison, and a truce was declared among the hooligans, but also between the towns. The truce has largely held since then, but is feeling more and more fragile with each passing day now.”

“The worst thing we know about other people is that we’re dependent upon them. That their actions affect our lives. Not just the people we choose, the people we like, but all the rest of them: the idiots. You who stand in front of us in every line, who can’t drive properly, who like bad television shows and talk too loud in restaurants and whose kids infect our kids with the winter vomiting bug at preschool. You who park badly and steal our jobs and vote for the wrong party. You also influence our lives, every second.”

“Life is a weird thing. We spend all our time trying to manage different aspects of it, yet we are still largely shaped by things that happen beyond our control.”

“We are at once too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to radically reshape Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them.”

“One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of.”

“So the story we hear of an individual rightly rewarded for his genius turns out to be a far more complicated story of a woman who created a game that thousands of collaborators then improved by playing it. A story of capitalism working turns out to be a story of capitalism failing. So many people got robbed by Darrow’s monopolism, but Elizabeth Magie’s loss is especially galling, because it wasn’t only her game that got buried by Monopoly but also the ideals she worked so hard to share. Magie’s rebuke of unregulated extractive capitalism was transformed into a celebration of getting rich by making others poor.”

“For days now, my brain has refused to allow me to finish a thought, constantly interrupting with worries. Even my worries get interrupted—by new worries, or facets of old worries I had not adequately considered. My thoughts are a river overflowing its banks, churning and muddy and ceaseless. I wish I wasn’t so scared all the time—scared of the virus, yes, but there is also some deeper fear: the terror of time passing, and me with it.”