Elisa Gabbert Quotes

As the French cultural theorist Paul Virilio famously said, “The invention of the ship was also the invention of the shipwreck.

These seem to be real questions we're wrestling with - where do I focus my anxiety so that I can feel like a good citizen in an anxious society? We believe we need to worry about the right problems, even if we can't solve them.

I think delicate people are frightening. But I also think fear is erotic.

My responsibility may be infinite, but my empathy is not, and there is more evil in the world at any given moment than I feel physically capable of processing, much less addressing with due thought and care.

Often, when something bad happens, I have a strange, instinctual desire for things to get even worse—I think of a terrible outcome and then wish for it. I recognize the pattern, but I don’t understand it. It’s as though my mind is running simulations and can’t help but prefer the most dramatic option—as though, in that eventuality, I could enjoy it from the outside.

I want to go to sleep and wake up and not be a terrible person.

Death by attrition. War of natural causes.

All my imagined futures have turned into memories. Today, there’s more past than yesterday. But is there any less future?

I don't want to feel good, I want to feel sad. Happiness lately feels mostly beside the point. It's not that I think I deserve punishment. Just weird fleeting wishes for tragedy.

Anything you do every day—that's your life.

...Hope is the dark part of morning The trees and not the sky behind A glimmer without a color...

The nuances of the terminology reflect degrees of stigma, but they influence stigma too - the names we give to people's discomfort affect how uncomfortable those people make us.

I ignore the evils that support my quality of life, to which I've become accustomed. We've arranged to make the evils that benefit us invisible.

In the era of fake news - a natural extension of the era of news proper - we don't just look to the media for facts, we look to it for narratives.

Reality is different. We have to discover what is out there—what is real and what is merely a product of our imagination.

Do our experiences belong to us? Are they a property, “like a hat”? (Wittgenstein says no.) Do you have to pay attention to your own desires, which you do not own, to be mindful? Can you not pay attention to your desires? Will attention excite or assuage my desire? (You can’t observe X without changing X.) I don’t care. I want to change my mind.

Before we are born, we exist even less than after we die. We should tremble when we think of that time. How long until we exist so little again? The past happens fast. If there was infinite past, the sky would be nothing but starlight. “Observed darkness and nonuniformity of night” make us finite. There are few stars, moving farther apart. The past is bright, but black and white. The future is dim but in color. The past is still. The future trembles.

Photos extend our existence, since they can live on after our deaths like poems or mummy masks.

Who am I when I sleep so deeply I wake up thinking of my childhood bed?

He says, There’s no clouds, with clouds in the background. He says, There’s no trees. I say, I’m looking at a tree right now. (The squirrel’s gravesite.) You can’t just talk about the weather anymore. There’s an urge to tell someone what’s happening, but the people who care know, and the people who don’t know don’t care.

I like listening to sad music when I’m sad. It doesn’t make me feel happier per se, it just improves the quality of the sadness.

I'll go gentle into that good night if I fucking want to.

Perhaps it's comforting to believe that disasters are the result of some fixable "fatal flaw," and not an inevitable part of the unfolding history.

Perhaps it's comforting to believe that disasters are the result of some fixable "fatal flaw," and not an inevitable part of the unfolding of history.

It's the spectacle, I think, that makes a disaster a disaster. A disaster is not defined simply by damage or death count; deaths by smoking or car wrecks are not a disaster because they are meted out, predictable. A disaster must not only blindside us, but be witnessed, and rewitnessed, in public.

I feel this way all the time now.Nothing is safe. Everything's fine.

Part of the job, I think, of the aphorist is to write statements that even she does not necessarily agree with.

Ecological disasters create the conditions of war, while giving us no one to bargain with - no one to fight or beg mercy from. Science improves our predictive power, but those predictions are often just a preview of the coming brute reality. While they may go some way toward preparing us psychologically, they can't in themselves protect us.

Especially now, when we're likely past the point of avoiding a climate calamity of our own creation, disasters can feel like karmic punishment. But the earth is not a vengeful god - just an indifferent one.

The value of a life, its worthiness of our moral regard, is determined by social relations.

There is a richness of detail in the media of suffering that tests the limits of our empathy - if not asking too much, then asking too often.

Societal mores are in place not to maintain the natural order but to enforce unnatural order.

Sometimes I think evil is merely cumulative, an effect of scale, a swarm intelligence. If it was just two boys who found each other in the woods, wouldn't they band together, become friends? Or would they become a group in search of an enemy?

I have a friend whose therapist tells him, 'you know too much to be happy', meaning it's too hard to live when you believe you can see how the rest of your life will play out. That may be what I miss most about youth; unknowing without fear.