

“I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
―
―
“Victimology is incompatible with growth and healing. If we want one, we must be prepared to give up the other.”
―
―

“We are told in fairy tales that evil always loses and good eventually will triumph. That is what makes those stories so desirable to the general population. They want to believe that karma works and the bad guys are always defeated in the end. But in a world where no one thinks they are the bad guy and everyone plays the victim, it is harder and harder to find the black and the white of a situation. We are all the hero, and we are all the monster.”
― Maybe With a Chance of Certainty
― Maybe With a Chance of Certainty

“Maybe there’s a heaven, like they say, a place where everything we’ve ever done is noted and recorded, weighed on big karma scales. Maybe not. Maybe this whole thing is just a giant experiment run by aliens who find out human hijinks amusing. Or maybe we’re an abandoned project started by a deity who checked out a long time ago, but we’re still hard-wired to believe, to try to make meaning out of the seemingly random. Maybe we’re all part of the same unconscious stew, dreaming the same dreams, hoping the same hopes, needing the same connection, trying to find it, missing, trying again—each of us playing our parts in the other’s plotlines, just one big ball of human yarn tangled up together. Maybe this is it.”
―
―

“Lonely people tend, rather, to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans. They are allergic to people. People affect them too strongly.”
― A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
― A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Babble’s 2024 Year in Books
Take a look at Babble’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
Polls voted on by Babble
Lists liked by Babble