Lulu Miller Quotes

Nowhere is the sky so blue, the grass so green, the sunshine so bright, the shade so welcome, as right here, now, today.

When I give up the fish, I get, at long last, that thing I had been searching for: a mantra, a trick, a prescription for hope. I get the promise that there are good things in store. Not because I deserve them. Not because I worked for them. But because they are as much a part of Chaos as destruction and loss. Life, the flip side of death. Growth, of rot.

Ignorance is the most delightful science in the world because it is acquired without labor or pains and keeps the mind from melancholy.

There is grandeur in this view of life. ....if you can’t see, shame on you.

It was the dandelion principle! To some people a dandelion might look like a weed, but to others that same plant can be so much more. To an herbalist, it’s a medicine—a way of detoxifying the liver, clearing the skin, and strengthening the eyes. To a painter, it’s a pigment; to a hippie, a crown; a child, a wish. To a butterfly, it’s sustenance; to a bee, a mating bed; to an ant, one point in a vast olfactory atlas.

I have come to believe that it is our life's work to tear down this order, to keep tugging at it, trying to unravel it, to set free the organisms trapped underneath. That it is our life's work work to mistrust our measures. Especially those about moral and mental standing. To remember that behind every ruler there is a Ruler. To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.

Growing up," she told me, "is learning to stop believing people's words about you.

How lonely it can feel inside a head with ideas you can’t figure out how to spit out.

Scientists have discovered, it's true, that employing positive illusions will help you achieve your goals. But I have slowly come to believe that far better things await outside of the tunnel vision of your goals.

...we barely know the world around us, even the simplest things under our feet..we have been wrong before and we will be wrong again...the true path to progress is paved not with certainty but doubt, with being "open to revision.

This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature's organisms. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the "whole machinery of life." The work of good science is to try and peer beyond the "convenient" lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.

Kafka calls it the Indestructible—the thing at the bottom of each individual that keeps going whether they feel like going or not.

The longer we examine our world, the stranger it proves to be.

Perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed upon us by evolution is the ability to believe we are more powerful than we are . . . You walk around with the fundamental belief that the world is uncaring, that no matter how hard you work there is no promise of success, that you are competing against billions, that you are vulnerable to the elements, and that everything you ever love will eventually be destroyed. A little lie can take the edge off, can help you keep charging forward into the gauntlet of life, where you sometimes, accidentally, prevail.

The true path to progress is paved not with certainty but with doubt, with being 'open to revision.

...people will never exchange comfort for truth.

Slowly, it came into focus. This small web of people keeping one another afloat. All these minuscule interactions- a friendly wave, a pencil sketch, some plastic beads strung up a nylon cord- they might not look like much from the outside, but for the people caught inside that web? They might be everything, the very tethers that keep one bound to this planet.

there are good things in store. Not because I deserve them. Not because I worked for them. But because they are as much a part of Chaos as destruction and loss.

I am reminded to do as Darwin did: to wonder about the reality waiting behind our assumption.

She said she had sympathy for the fish, then. Sympathy for the idea that once you name something, you tend to stop looking at it.

When people have this feeling of personal inefficiency, compulsive collecting helps them in feeling better.

While other people don’t matter, either, treat them like they do.

The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the "convenient" lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition, where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.

The best way of ensuring you don't miss them(the good things in store), these gifts, the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness and see them more clearly, is to admit, with every breath, that you have no idea what you are looking at. To examine each object in the avalanche of Chaos with curiosity, with doubt.

But perhaps the most damning argument came from nature herself. Had David followed his own advice to look to nature for truth, he would have seen it. This dazzling, feathery, squawking, gurgling mound of counterevidence. Animals can outperform humans on nearly every measure supposedly associated with our superiority. There are crows that have better memories than us, chimps with better pattern-recognition skills, ants that rescue their wounded, and blood flukes with higher rates of monogamy. When you actually examine the range of life on Earth, it takes a lot of acrobatics to sort it into a single hierarchy with humans at the top. We don’t have the biggest brain or the best memory. We’re not the fastest or the strongest or the most prolific. We’re not the only ones that mate for life, that show altruism, use tools, language. We don’t have the most copies of genes in circulation. We aren’t even the newest creation on the block.

[David Starr Jordan] claims that salvation lies in the electricity of our bodies. “Happiness comes from doing, helping, working, loving, fighting, conquering,” he writes in a syllabus from around the same time, “from the exercise of functions; from self-activity.” Don’t overthink it, I think, is his point. Enjoy the journey. Savor the small things. The “luscious” taste of a peach, the “lavish” colors of tropical fish, the rush from exercise that allows one to experience “the stern joy which warriors feel.

In plainer terms", Baumeister and Bushman write, "it is not so much the people who regard themselves as superior beings who are the most dangerous but, rather those who have a strong desire to regard themselves as superior beings....People who are preoccupied with validating a grandiose self-image apparently find criticism highly upsetting and lash out against the source of it.

It's not if, it's when. Chaos is the only sure thing in this world. The master that rules us all.

I have strived my whole life to follow in his nihilistic, clown-shoed footsteps. To stare our pointlessness in the face, and waddle along toward happiness because of it.

And then there was that key point in On the Origin of Species. That crucial point that somehow both David and before him Francis Galton had missed. What does Darwin say is the best way of building a strong species, of allowing it to endure into the future, to withstand the blows of Chaos in all her mighty forms—flood, drought, rising sea levels, fluctuating temperatures, invasions of competitors, predators, pests? Variation. Variation in genes, and hence in behavior and physical traits. Homogeneity is a death sentence. To rid a species of its mutants and outliers is to make that species dangerously vulnerable to the elements.

the problem with spending one’s time pondering the futility of it all is that you divert that precious electricity gifted to you by evolution—those sacred ions that could make you feel so many wonderful sensations and think so many wonderful ideas—and you flush it all down the drain of existential inquiry, causing you to literally “die while the body is still alive.

[I]t is our life’s work to mistrust our measures. Especially those about moral and mental standing. To remember that behind every ruler there is a ruler. To remember that a category is at best a proxy; at worst, a shackle.” •

Growing up,” she told me, “is learning to stop believing people’s words about you.

In every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.

You don't matter seems to fuel his every step, his every bite. So live as you please. He spent years riding a motorbike, drinks copious amounts of beer, and enters the water, whenever possible, with the belliest of flops. He seems to permit himself just one lie to constrain his otherwise voracious hedonism, to form a kind of moral code. While other people don't matter, either, treat them like they do.

Kafka calls it the Indestructible—the thing at the bottom of each individual that keeps going whether they feel like going or not. The Indestructible is a place that has nothing to do with optimism—instead, it’s something far deeper and far less self-conscious than optimism—the Indestructible is the thing we mask with all sorts of other symbols, hopes, and ambitions—that don’t force you to acknowledge what is underneath. Well…if you do (or are forced to) remove all those excesses, you get the Indestructible, and once you acknowledge it, Kafka goes deeper—he doesn’t let you think the Indestructible is optimistic or positive—instead it is the thing that could actually rip us apart and destroy us…

There is grandeur in this view,” scolds a quote from Darwin hanging over my dad’s desk at his lab. The words are written in looping brown calligraphy, enclosed in a varnished wooden frame. The quote comes from the last sentence of *On the Origin of Species*. It is Darwin’s sweet nothing, his apology for deflating the world of its God, his promise that there is grandeur—if you look hard enough, you’ll find it. But sometimes it felt like an accusation. If you can’t see it, shame on you.

He informed me that there is no meaning of life. There is no point. There is no God. No one watching you or caring in any way. There is no afterlife. No destiny. No plan. And don’t believe anyone who tells you there is. These are all things people dream up to comfort themselves against the scary feeling that none of this matters and you don’t matter. But the truth is, none of this matters and you don’t matter.

Camus estimates it’s on the mind of a majority of us at any moment. That remedy for pain so enticing that eighteenth-century poet William Cowper termed it the “grand temptation.

odd to think that in embryonic form, we are nearly identical. Finally, we arrive at the holotype I have come to see.

As I kept driving, I pictured all the dandelions in the whole wide world nodding their heads in unison at me finally getting it...

Every age gets the lunatics it deserves,

We are specks, flickering in and out of existence, with no significance to the cosmos.

In this way, Agassiz presented nature as a sacred text. Even the dullest slug or dandelion could offer spiritual and moral guidance to those humans curious enough to look.

Perhaps he had cracked something essential about how to have hope in a world of no promises, about how to carry forward on the darkest days.

I get the promise that there are good things in store. Not because I deserve them. Not because I worked for them. But because they are as much a part of Chaos as destruction and loss.

...we barely know the world around us, even the simplest things under our feet. We have been wrong before and we will be wrong again. The true path to progress is paved not with certainty but doubt, with being "open to revision".

Every age gets the lunatics it deserves,” British historian Roy Porter once wrote. So what will become of us? This nation programming its kids to ignore reality when convenient. To whisper anything they need to keep themselves going.

Day and night. Friends and colleagues were lowered into the earth. Dust to Dust. The dust temporarily settling, as though in a temporary truce, then rising, swirling and rushing David’s laboratory windows, bearing mites and putrescine and bacteria, threatening to begin its irreversible process of decay. The men watered and watered and watered. Maybe such unruly persistence is beautiful. Maybe it is not mad, after all. Maybe it is the quiet work of believing in Good. Of believing in a warmth, which you know does not exist in the stars, to exist in the hearts of fellow humans. Maybe it is something like trust.

He says that the problem with spending one’s time pondering the futility of it all is that you divert that precious electricity gifted to you by evolution—those sacred ions that could make you feel so many wonderful sensations and solve so many scientific puzzles—and you flush it all down the drain of existential inquiry, causing you to literally “die while the body is still alive.

I liked Chicago. The cold of it. The anonymity of it. I could be anyone. I put on Converse sneakers and walked along the gritty sidewalks, which seemed to contain just a dash of carbonation. I bounced. I felt like I could become the person I wanted to be. Not a cheater, not a depressive, not a recipient of cosmic justice. But a person with a happy home at home. But on nights when Heather was gone, gone with her boyfriend across town, when the city light poured in purple through the window, I'd realize I could not ignore the reality of it all. The emptiness of my life. An emptiness that was only growing wider and colder as I warmed by the light of my hope. And so. I was desperate. Simply put. I was desperate to come up with some way of continuing forward on what looked like a doomed mission.

Darwin had observed so much variety in creatures traditionally assumed to be one species that his sense of a hard line between species had slowly begun to dissolve. Even that most sacred line, the supposed inability of different species to create fertile offspring, he realized was bunk. “It cannot be maintained that species when intercrossed are invariably sterile,” Darwin writes, “or that sterility is a special endowment and sign of creation.” Leading him finally to declare that species—and indeed all those fussy ranks taxonomists believe to be immutable in nature (genus, family, order, class, etc.)—were human inventions. Useful but arbitrary lines we draw around an ever-evolving flow of life for our “convenience.” “Natura non facet salute,” he writes. Nature doesn’t jump. Nature has no edges, no hard lines.

Whatever the case, it works for him. He loses a wife, and wins another quickly. He loses a fish collection, and rebuilds a bigger one. He is promoted to higher and higher offices. The awards and medals start clattering in, for teaching, for ichthyology, for contributions to higher ed. An odd alchemy of delusion right before your eyes. Little lies transmuting into bronze, silver, gold. Forget millennia of warnings to stay humble; maybe this is just how it works in a godless system. Maybe David Starr Jordan is proof that a steady dose of hubris is the best way of overcoming doomed odds.

I get the promise that there are good things in store. Not because I deserve them. Not because I worked for them. But because they are as much a part of Chaos as destruction and loss. Life, the flip side of death. Growth, of rot. The best way of ensuring that you don't miss them, these gifts, the trick that has helped me squint at the bleakness and see them more clearly, is to admit, with every breath, that you have no idea what you are looking at. To examine each object in the avalanche of Chaos with curiosity, with doubt.

You’re setting yourself up for disappointment, was how Robins and Beer explained it: “short-term benefits but long-term costs.” In other words, the lie catches up. The power of the rosy lens seems to have a limit. And when it runs out, the fact of your impotence will really sting.

When the package arrived, it felt warm, enchanted. As if it contained a treasure map. I slid a steak knife through the packing tape, and two olive-green tomes spilled out, each glittering with gold letters. I made a huge pot of coffee and sat down on the couch, the first volume on my lap, ready to find out what becomes of you when you refuse to surrender to Chaos.

The rustling of women’s bodies just a couple of millimeters away through that flimsy sailcloth. The rustling of the auburn-haired woman who was, at that moment, climbing out of her clothes and into her sheets. Skin on sheets making a rustling, which must have agitated some of the male sleepers,

When you give up the stars, you get a universe. So what happens when you give up the fish?

Chaos is the only sure thing in this world. The master that rules us all.

All these miniscule interactions—a friendly wave, a pencil sketch, some plastic beads strung up a nylon cord—they might not look like much from the outside, but for the people caught inside that web? They might be everything, the very tethers that keep one bound to this planet.

This was what Darwin was trying so hard to get his readers to see: that there is never just one way of ranking nature’s organisms. To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the “whole machinery of life.” The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the “convenient” lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition, where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.

To get stuck on a single hierarchy is to miss the bigger picture, the messy truth of nature, the “whole machinery of life.” The work of good science is to try to peer beyond the “convenient” lines we draw over nature. To peer beyond intuition, where something wilder lives. To know that in every organism at which you gaze, there is complexity you will never comprehend.

It was the work of deciphering God’s plan, the meaning of life, and possibly even the path to building a better society. I picture

Just a reminder of what I'd always been told. There is grandeur, and if you can't see it, shame on you. -- Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist

When I give up the fish, I get, at long last, that thing I had been searching for: a mantra, a trick, a prescription for hope.

And so. I was desperate. Simply put. I was desperate to discover the precise line in David Starr Jordan's scripture that justified forward momentum on doomed missions.

And then, on page 430, I saw it. Under a section called "How to SEcure Fishes," he divulges a secret to his intrepid readers, the ones who have stayed with him this long. His favorite trick for catching the peskiest of fish, the ones that evade capture by darting into the cracks of tide pools, Poison. The particular variety he recommends? A dangerous and powerful substance, one he once described as "the bitterest thing in the world." Strychnine.

Kafka calls it the Indestructible—the thing at the bottom of each individual that keeps going whether they feel like going or not. The Indestructible is a place that has nothing to do with optimism—

The country round about my home was very rich in wild flow-ers," he writes, trying to blame the earth for his sin.

He seems to permit himself just one lie to constrain his otherwise voracious hedonism, to form a kind of moral code. While other people don't matter, either, treat them like they do.

Happiness comes from doing, helping, working, loving, fighting, conquering,” he writes in a syllabus from around the same time, “from the exercise of functions; from self-activity.” Don’t overthink it, I think, is his point. Enjoy the journey. Savor the small things. The “luscious” taste of a peach, the “lavish” colors of tropical fish, the rush from exercise that allows one to experience “the stern joy which warriors feel.” Toward the end of the book, he quotes Thoreau—“There is no hope for you unless this bit of sod under your feet is the sweetest to you in this world—in any world”—and then he sends his readers off with a rousing dose of carpe diem. “Nowhere is the sky so blue, the grass so green, the sunshine so bright, the shade so welcome, as right here, now, today.

After Rufus's death, David's journals explode with color. Meticulously rendered sketches of wildflowers and ferns and ivies and brambles and any scraps of nature, it seemed, he could tear away from the world. The drawings are not artful; they are labored, covered in pencil smudges, ink stains, eraser marks, and little tears from overly vigorous coloring in. But in the crudeness you can see it-his obsession, his desperation, the near-muscular effort he was exerting to pin down the forms of the things unknown to him.

He informed me that there is no meaning of life. There is no point. There is no God. No one watching you or caring in any way. There is no afterlife. No destiny. No plan. And don't believe anyone who tells you there is. These are all things people dream up to comfort themselves against the scary feeling that none of this matters and you don't matter. But the truth is, none of this matters and you don't matter. Then he patted me on the head.

Like a good boy, he obeyed: he stopped making maps. But like a real boy, he did not. Not really.

The country round about my home was very rich in wild flowers," he writes, trying to blame the earth for his sin.

For accomplishing such a feat, the old man was regarded by his neighbors as "shiftless and a waster of time.

Even atheists like ritual.

to wonder about the reality waiting behind our assumptions.

philodendrons.

Perhaps the greatest gift ever bestowed on us by evolution is the ability to believe we are more powerful than we are.

It is Darwin's sweet nothing, his apology for deflowering the world of its God, his promise that there is grandeur - if you look hard enough, you'll find it. But sometimes it felt like an accusation. If you can't see it, shame on you.

That levity was the quality I wanted to be near, the substance I wanted to learn how to manufacture in myself, the recipe that, as far and wide as I searched, I seemed unable to find.

Sarebbe stata... ...la stessa immagine del mondo che ho io, sin da bambina, mi sforzavo così tanto di non guardare. Quella sensazione di sporgersi sul burrone del mondo e cadere in verticale insieme alle formiche, alle barche a vela e alle stelle, senza un senso o un motivo. Di scorgere con chiarezza, dentro Caos, la verità abbagliante e spietata: tu non conti nulla.

His point is simply that the human mind is not always so good at carving up its world, that the names we place on things often turn out to be wrong. Were “slaves” subhuman creatures, unworthy of freedom? Were “witches” deserving of the stake? His chair example is intended in the same spirit: a reminder to stay humble, to stay wary of what we believe, about even the most basic things in our lives. “I think you have to think that if you want to make progress.

Maybe it is not mad, after all. Maybe it is the quiet work of believing in Good. Of believing in warmth, which you know does not exist in the stars, to exist in the hearts of fellow humans. Maybe it is something like trust. -- Miller, Why Fish Don't Exist (it's for some reason not in the list)

Chaos will rot your plants and kill your dog and rust your bike. It will decay your most precious memories, topple your favorite cities, wreck any sanctuary you can ever build. It’s not if, it’s when. Chaos is the only sure thing in this world. The master that rules us all. My scientist father taught me early that there is no escaping the Second Law of Thermodynamics: entropy is only growing; it can never be diminished, no matter what we do.

mind bogglingly, approximately a third of all Puerto Rican women were sterilized by the US government between 1933 and 1968.

Every age gets the lunatics it deserves,” British historian Roy Porter once wrote.

Kafka calls it the Indestructible—the thing at the bottom of each individual that keeps going whether they feel like going or not. The Indestructible is a place that has nothing to do with optimism—instead, it’s something far deeper and far less self-conscious than optimism—the Indestructible is the thing we mask with all sorts of other symbols, hopes, and ambitions—that don’t force you to acknowledge what is underneath. Well… if you do (or are forced to) remove all those excesses, you get the Indestructible, and once you acknowledge it, Kafka goes deeper—he doesn’t let you think the Indestructible is optimistic or positive—instead it is the thing that could actually rip us apart and destroy us…

You don’t matter seems to fuel his every step, his every bite. So live as you please. He spent years riding a motorbike, drinks copious amounts of beer, and enters the water, whenever possible, with the belliest of flops. He seems to permit himself just one lie to constrain his otherwise voracious hedonism, to form a kind of moral code. While other people don’t matter, either, treat them like they do.

Maybe it was okay to have some outsized faith in yourself. Maybe plunging along in complete denial of your doomed chances was not the mark of a fool but—it felt sinful to think it—a victor?

Snorkel is best invention. God bless snorkel inventor. It win peace prize?

Perhaps he had cracked something essential about how to have hope in a world of no promises, about how to carry forward on the darkest days. About how to have faith without Faith.

But when I landed in college, I noticed what looked like a gleaming. A goofy, doofy, curly-haired man with broad shoulders brushed by me in the hallway one day. He smelled like cinnamon. He had teddy-brown eyes and performed in the college’s improv group. He was the best one by far, made big gestures, made jokes from a place of kindness and whimsy, pulled ripples of laughter out of this cold, hard world. I used to sit in the audience and marvel. He seemed like an impossibility. It took years. Years of slowly befriending him through mutual friends. Years of calling into his late-night, freestyle-rap radio show, daring my tongue to try… to rhyme on the fly! I even joined the improv group. And eventually, one night I told him how I felt and instead of flinching away, as I had assumed he would, as the boys in the hallway had made it seem that he would, he kissed me. After graduating college, we moved in together, to a small one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn with a red Formica table and a great front stoop. I finagled my way into a job helping produce a radio program all about science and wonder. He was continuing with comedy—stand-up and improv and writing—and working as a yellow-cab driver to support himself. We stayed up late into the night, sipping beers on the stoop, talking about our days, turning awkward moments and missteps into jokes. I felt like I had found the thing I had thought could never exist. Refuge. It smelled like cinnamon and its walls were made of bad puns and cheap rhymes, piling higher and higher against the chill of the world. My head became full of visions for the future. The TV shows we would write, the tree houses we would build, the way the grass would curl between our toes as we chased our kids through the yard. Until, seven years into it, I toppled the whole thing. Late one night on a beach five hundred miles away from him, possessed by moonlight and red wine and the smell of a bonfire, I reached out for the bouncing blond girl I had been trying not to eye all night. She was wet from swimming; she was prickled in goose bumps, hundreds of goose bumps, that I wanted to press flat with my tongue. She smiled as I placed my hand on her waist, as I touched my lips to her neck. The stars wrapped around us. Her steam became mine. When I told the curly-haired man what I had done, he told me it was over.

His point is simply that the human mind is not always so good at carving up its world, that the names we place on things often turn out to be wrong.

as though to say that this passion of his could not be swatted out of him, crumpled up or thrown away

And that's when they would begin revving their proverbial chainsaws at the tree of life.

about Linnaeus, to learn a little Darwin, a little DNA, so I could better understand the

Scientists have discovered, it’s true, that employing positive illusions will help you achieve your goals. But I have slowly come to believe that far better things await outside of the tunnel vision of your goals.

Perhaps that heartbreak will prove to be a gift, the hard edge off which you reluctantly bounce to find a better match. Perhaps even your dreams need examining. Perhaps even your hope… needs some doubt.