Questionable Fiction

Words without lips make no sound

[suppressedzak]

"Kahneman later codified his research in the 2011 bestseller Thinking, Fast and Slow. Man, he wrote, has two systems of thought: System 1, our animal mind, is fast, instinctive, and emotional; System 2 is slow, deliberative, and logical. And System 1 is far more influential. In fact, it guides and steers our rational thoughts."

[suppressedzak]

"Thanks to my ridiculous, sometimes tragic, and always unsteady upbringing, I was given the gift of bone-crushing insecurity." ... "But luckily for me, I found a way to deal with myself and my family by treating it all like a constant and ongoing art project, for you all to enjoy. Enjoy! You're welcome!" - Mark Oliver Everett, Things the grandchildren should know

[suppressedzak]

"I spent the day writing my letter to the dead and was answered at night in my sleep." - Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

[suppressedzak]

"No one is born just once. If you're lucky, you'll emerge again in someone's arms; or unlucky, awake when the long tail of terror brushes the inside of your skull." -Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces

[suppressedzak]

"Friendship rests on the presumption of reciprocity, of drifting in and out of one another's lives, with occasional moments of wild intensity."

[suppressedzak]

[suppressedzak]

"Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other's expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refractured commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key." - Michelle Zauner, Crying In H Mart

[suppressedzak]

"In the face of life and death, the open road—once so full of grit and possibility, the strangers it harbored so creative and generous, the light of the lifestyle—I had once found so glamorous began to dim." - Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

[suppressedzak]

"It was doubly worse when they got the Black and Spanish kids to join in, and even worse than that was when they got the Korean girls to participate, too, because most of them also spoke English with an accent, and there was something so undignified about having someone torment you for something they themselves were probably tormented for a year or two ago. It made me think the whole world was vicious. No one had it in them to have a heart for anyone, not even themselves, or at least, not the selves they once were that other people still had to be."

[suppressedzak]

"We clipped out photos of houses on Long Island that we were going to move into one day if we did everything right, if we lived long enough. We made secret and not-so-secret promises to ourselves that this current life was temporary. No one lives this way forever. We told ourselves we were going to escape one day or another, although I never figured out if dying counted as escape."

[suppressedzak]

"Innocence is both a privilege and a cognitive handicap, a sheltered unknowingness that, once protracted into adulthood, hardens into entitlement." - Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong

[suppressedzak]

"There should be a word for this neurological sensation, this uncanny weightlessness, where a universally beloved ritual tricks your synapses to fire back to the past, but finding no reserve of memories, your mind gropes dumbly, like the feelers of a mollusk groping the empty ocean floor." - Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong

[suppressedzak]

"I don't think, therefore I am—I hurt, therefore I am. Therefore, my books are graded on a pain scale. If it's 2, maybe it's not worth telling my story. If it's 10, maybe my book will be a bestseller." - Minor Feelings, Cathy Park Hong

[suppressedzak]

"I could get on board with truth-seeking, and as far as I could tell, rationality primarily offered frameworks for living that bordered on self-help. This made sense: religious institutions were eroding, corporations demanded near-spiritual commitments, information overwhelmed, and social connection had been outsourced to the internet—everyone was looking for something. " - Anna Weiner, Uncanny Valley

[suppressedzak]

"I did not see myself becoming an executor of the sixties counterculture, but I was interested in its endurance——even startup founders held company retreats at Sea Ranch. Everywhere else, the counterculture was a historical subject, a costume-party theme, kitsch. Certainly, this side of the sixties was not a reference for my friends in New York. They had back-to-the-land fantasies, too, of a sort: renovated barns up the Hudson, with vegetable gardens and vintage pickup trucks and farmhouse sinks. Utopianism did not loom large. I didn't know if this indicated clear-eyed realism or a failure of imagination." - Anna Weiner, Uncanny Valley

[suppressedzak]

"Working in tech without a technical background felt like moving to a foreign country without knowing the language. I didn't mind trying. Programming was tedious, but it wasn't hard. I found some enjoyment in its clarity: it was like math, or copyediting. There was an order, a clear distinction between right and wrong. When I had edited or vetted manuscripts at the literary agency, I moved primarily on instinct and feeling, with the constant terror that I would ruin someone else's creative work. Code, by contrast, was responsive and uncaring. Like nothing else in my life, when I made a mistake, it let me know immediately." – Anna Weiner, Uncanny Valley

[suppressedzak]

"The city, trapped in nostalgia for its own mythology, stuck in a hallucination of a halcyon past, had not quite caught up to the newfound momentum of tech's dark tirade: capital, power, and a bland, overcorrected, heterosexual masculinity." - Anna Weiner, Uncanny Valley