I do not believe that facts ever quite stare anybody in the face. From a psychologist’s point of view, that is not how facts behave, as we well know from our studies of perception, memory, and thinking. Our factual worlds are more like cabinetry carefully carpentered than like a virgin forest inadvertently stumbled upon.
Yah, so, I mean, in the book, I used this phrase -- which I assume someone must have used before, but it appears they haven't; at least, I've Googled it -- which is: Advertising's very, very old. A flower is effectively a weed with a marketing budget. And the reason that advertising is necessary by plants is that the bee can only discover whether there's a worthwhile supply of nectar available in the plant by actually visiting it. And there is a mechanism that is necessary that delivers a reliable signal of promise of the presence of nectar, of which large petals and a variety of other signaling tools are merely one form. And so the very fact that advertising is an upfront cost is a reliable indicator of seller confidence. Because if the flower wasn't expecting the bees to come back for a second visit, it wouldn't pay it to grow these huge, great petals.
Washington is essentially a place where, uh, run by lawyers who occasionally take advice from economists
To treat literature as art doesn't require prostrate reverence before old men on dusty pedestals. Let me offer an example. Twenty years ago, in a calendar of Auckland city scenes, one photograph showed a beach front, a scoria embankment, and a man jogging past, allowing us to see the scale of things. In letters more than two feet high, and in a message about thirty feet long, someone had spray-painted on the scoria wall a great graffito, a single sentence: "Ralph, come back, it was only a rash."Also quoted in his book On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction (2010)
. . . Write what you must, then walk away from it is
not the hardest thing I've ever had to learn, by any stretch,
only one of the hardest. . . .
. . . But this is waking,
and this his favorite horse, whom he's never named,
that's how much he loves her, though she's
branded, sure, the way all his horses are: "Without
mystery, what chance for hope"–in Latin, on the left
flank where it catches the light, loses it, the king
sashless and in flight, though it looks processional,
he thinks–stately, almost–as the newly fallen believe
at first there's still a plan available: they'll save themselves.
. . . The higher
gods having long refused me, let the gods deemed lesser
do the best they can — so a friend I somewhere along the way
lost hold of used to drunkenly announce, usually just before
passing out. I think he actually believed that stuff; he must
surely, by now, be dead. . . .