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In depression one doesn't see meaningful patterns or connections and life seems meaningless. However, the pattern perceiver is turned down just enough to miss these interpretations but not enough because it is still responding with the interpretation of being depressed. In other words, it is ironic to consider that the depressed person is closer to enlightenment than the person with anxiety. If they turned the pattern perceiver down just a little more, the interpreter, by being off for a while, would become opaque in the sense that if we see a shadow move, we can infer that something is casting it.

The Neurotic’s Guide to Avoiding Enlightenment

Excellence is also not the opposite of failure. But in virtually all aspects of human endeavor, people assume that it is and that if they study what leads to pathological functioning and do the reverse—or replace what they found missing—they can create optimal functioning. That assumption is flawed. Study disease and you will learn a lot about disease and precious little about health. Eradicating depression will get you no closer to joy. Divorce is mute on the topic of happy marriage. Exit interviews with employees who leave tell you nothing about why others stay. If you study failure, you’ll learn a lot about failure but nothing about how to achieve excellence. Excellence has its own pattern.

Marcus Buckingham and Ashley Goodall. The Feedback Fallacy.

Hi-Level plumbing is utterly simple: just wide, straight pipes that dump directly onto the tracks. Superliner toilet systems, by contrast, are high-tech marvels. They feature thirty-gallon holding tanks and a mechanical digestive system that liquefies waste and ejects it onto the tracks in a fine mist, leaving no unsightly residue.

Henry Kisor. Zephyr.

…Michael Pedersen Kierkegaard, a shrewd businessman who retired at the age of forty to spend the remainder of his days in reading philosophy and theology, debating with professors whom he frequently invited to dinner at the home, and disputing with any and all. But this argumentative man was much more than a dilettante in philosophy and theology, a shrewd dialectician and gracious host. He was a man who had an intense burden of guilt which reached back to his childhood. One rainy day on the top of a little hill when he was a child, cold, lonely, and hungry, keeping someone else’s sheep on the heaths of Denmark, he shook his fist at the sky and cursed Almighty God who had made him such a miserable creature. After this event things went better and the child became the man and the man became prosperous. Though most of us would tend to think such material prosperity the blessing of God, he felt that it was a divine curse upon him, and became morose, lonely, and guilty in his inner life.

Robert L. Perkins. Søren Kierkegaard.

So it snowed last night. Take your eyes off this city and it will play tricks. While you are sleeping it pranks to build your character.

Colson Whitehead. The Colossus of New York.

Every true work of art -- and thus every attempt at art -- must be judged primarily, though not exclusively, by its own laws. If it has no laws, or if its laws are incoherent, it fails -- usually -- on that basis.

Gardener, John. The Art of Fiction.

These mountains proclaim a message that is easy to understand when you have seen their steep walls and layers upon layers of rock, twisted, cracked, filled with gaping wounds."We have suffered most brutally," they announce, "and we are suffering still." But they say it proudly, sternly, and with clenched teeth, like ancient, indomitable warriors.

Hesse, Hermann. Peter Camenzind.

Ports disrupted everything. I soon learned this, and gave up trying to eat or sleep by the clock. The best time to sleep was mid-voyage, because then the ship had a steady rhythm to it, and the food in the restaurant was also better, because then the crew was eating.

Christopher Priest. The Affirmation.

Long ago Yoshiro had been in thrall to those huge, heavy bath towels. Every time he used one he would stick it in the washing machine, tossing handfuls of laundry detergent in after it, but those days now seemed like a joke. Spinning all those heavy towels around in its belly was agony for the poor washing machine -- each one would die of sheer exhaustion after a few years. Hundreds of thousands of dead washing machines had sunk to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean to become capsule hotels for fish.

Yoko Tawada & Margaret Mitsutani. The Emissary.

Nothing was what I wanted, but all of it had been given to me.

Christopher Priest. The Affirmation.

There was always the first surprise, an internal jolt: he has changed, she looks older. Then, within a few seconds, the perception changes and all that can be seen are the similarities. The mind adjusts, the eye allows; the ageing process, the differences of clothes and hair and possessions, are edited out by the will to detect continuity. Memory is mistrusted in the recognition of more important identifications. Body-weight might differ, but a person's height or bone-structure do not. Soon it is as if nothing at all has altered. The mind erases backwards, re-creating what one remembers.

Christopher Priest. The Affirmation.

I was demoralized, bruised and miserable, obsessed with the accumulating unfairness of life and the crushing mess of London. I focused much of my distemper on London: I noticed only its bad qualities. The noise, the dirt, the crowds, the expensive public transport, the inefficient service in shops and restaurants, the delays and muddles: all these seemed to me symptomatic of the random factors that had disrupted my life.

Christopher Priest. The Affirmation.

In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography

Jorge Luis Borges. On Exactitude in Science.

We tramp around the countryside in search of suitable material, continually complaining from morning till night of the hardships we have to undergo. When, however, we are describing our journey to someone else, we show not even the slightest bit of discontent. [...] while actually on the journey our feelings are just the same as those of anyone else. It is only afterwards when we tell our experiences to others that we revert to being artists.

Natsume Sōseki and Turney, Alan. Kusamakura.

There is not a single Western cake which can give one so much pleasure. Cream, I admit, has a soft colour, but for all that there is something rather heavy about it. Jelly looks like a jewel, but its trembling and shaking deprive it of the solidity of a yokan; while that intricately shaped heap of sugar and milk which they call blancmange is an absurdity which is beyond the power of words to describe.

Natsume Sōseki and Turney, Alan. Kusamakura.

The fog comes on little cat feet. It sits looking over harbor and city on silent haunches and then moves on.

Sandburg, Carl.

The whole area is yours, but since it is just like a painting or a poem, it never occurs to you to try and develop it, or make your fortune by running a railway line there from the city.

Natsume Sōseki and Turney, Alan. Kusamakura.

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