Mimicry Quotes

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

It's tragic how few people ever 'possess their souls' before they die. 'Nothing is more rare in any man', says Emerson, 'than an act of his own.' It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their life is a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Although I could never get used to the constant state of anxiety in which the guilty, the great, and the tenderhearted live, I felt I was doing my best in the way of mimicry.

The mimicry of passion is the most intolerable of all poses.

It is tragic how few people ever ‘possess their souls’ before they die. ‘Nothing is more rare in any man,’ says Emerson, ‘than an act of his own.’ It is quite true. Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Yet I'm sure there's something more to be read in a man. People dare not -- they dare not turn the page. The laws of mimicry -- I call them the laws of fear. People are afraid to find themselves alone, and don't find themselves at all. I hate this moral agoraphobia -- it's the worst kind of cowardice. You can't create something without being alone. But who's trying to create here? What seems different in yourself: that's the one rare thing you possess, the one thing which gives each of us his worth; and that's just what we try to suppress. We imitate. And we claim to love life.

Her smiles, her mimicries, all the words she uttered were addressed to herself through him.

Every athlete learns by theft and mimicry.

When two people talk, they don’t just fall into physical and aural harmony. They also engage in what is called motor mimicry. If you show people pictures of a smiling face or a frowning face, they’ll smile or frown back, although perhaps only in muscular changes so fleeting that they can only be captured with electronic sensors. If I hit my thumb with a hammer, most people watching will grimace: they’ll mimic my emotional state. This is what is meant, in the technical sense, by empathy. We imitate each other’s emotions as a way of expressing support and caring and, even more basically, as a way of communicating with each other.

Above, great constellations wheeled to which our bonfire sparks ascended in their tiny mimicry

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Belonging cues are behaviors that create safe connection in groups. They include, among others, proximity, eye contact, energy, mimicry, turn taking, attention, body language, vocal pitch, consistency of emphasis, and whether everyone talks to everyone else in the group.

Mimicry, they argue, is also one of the means by which we infect each other with our emotions. In other words, if I smile and you see me and smile in response—even a microsmile that takes no more than several milliseconds—it’s not just you imitating or empathizing with me. It may also be a way that I can pass on my happiness to you.

Have I ever done anything of my own, an act or state that arose from Elefsis, and not careful, exquisite mimicry? Have they?

I believe the most difficult situation to be in, is one of mind-game-playing. Interestingly enough, it can be observed that it’s those from the most prosperous countries that tend to play the most mind-games with other people. They even write things about it. Why is it very difficult to be honest and transparent about what one thinks and feels? Why must one resort to manipulations and mind-mockery and mimicry? It is such a sad situation or state for any person to be in. Living in cubicle within cubicle within cubicle of themselves. Victims and perpetrators of mind games, interestingly, are the most paranoid about it happening to them— because they do it, they think everyone else does it too. Or because it’s been done to them, they think everyone will do it to them. Why cannot people say what they think, think what they say, say what they mean and mean what they say? The world would be happier if we were all just living out in a big plain in Africa! Roaming with animals, walking barefoot, being simple, transparent, real...

Listen, then repeat. Listen, then repeat. That was all it took to pretend well. What was a person’s self but carefully articulated mimicry?

By the time it has gotten dressed, it has become he; has become already more or less George — though still not the whole George they demand and are prepared to recognize. Those who call him on the phone at this hour of the morning would be bewildered, maybe even scared, if they could realize what this three-quarters-human thing is what they are talking to. But, of course, they never could—its voice's mimicry of their George is nearly perfect.

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That’s where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth’s eager devastation.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry! O falling fire and piercing cry and panic, and a weak mailed fist clenched ignorant against the sky!

Basketball allowed me to revere my father without him knowing what I was up to. I took up basketball as a form of homage and mimicry.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

In retrospect, I see that this was my education., the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who'd deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

Rynn Cormel had run the world during the Turn, his living charisma somehow crossing the boundaries of death to give his undead existence an uncanny mimicry of life. Every move was a careful study of causality. It was highly unusual for so young an undead vampire to be so good at mimicking having a soul. I figured it was because he was a politician and had had practice way before he died.

Self-confidence seemed to me more mimicry than anything else and I suggested visiting Clifton Zoo to watch the leaders in a group of baboons, and learn from them: make your gestures slow and deliberate; cultivate a deeper voice; appear casual at all times; eschew all rapid movements. That was all you had to do to look confident.

When a hypothesis enters a scientist's mind, he checks it by calculation and experiment, that is, by the mimicry and the pantomime of truth. It's plausibility infects others, and the hypothesis is accepted as the true explanation for the given phenomenon, until someone finds its faults.

Mimicry can be unkind, but at least it acknowledges that you’re there.

Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.

These conversations between the Spirits and the Ghosts--were they only the mimicry of choices that had really been made long ago? Or might yet not as well say, anticipations of a choice to be made at the end of all things? But ye'd do better to say neither. Ye saw the choices a bit more clearly than ye could see them on earth: the lens was clearer. But it was still seen through the lens. Do not ask of a vision in a dream more than a vision in a dream can give.

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

The way the kids of immigrants heard about America, you would think it was not down the stairs and out the door but still across the ocean, a distant place where everything is promised and, for hard work, everything is given. From the day he left his parents' house, Abe [Reles] had to know his father was right, that America promises everything, but he also had to know his father was wrong--America gives nothing. Those things that are promised, they cannot be worked for but must be taken, conned away with good looks, obsequiousness, mimicry; or traded for with bit of your soul or the morals of the stories your parents told; or tricked away with lies; or wrested away with brute force.

Fowles has said that the nineteenth-century narrator was assuming the omniscience of a god. I rather think that the opposite is the case--this kind of fictive narrator can creep closer to the feelings and the inner life of characters--as well as providing a Greek chorus--than any first person mimicry.

We are accustomed to understand art to be only what we hear and see in theaters, concerts, and exhibitions, together with buildings, statues, poems, novels. . . . But all this is but the smallest part of the art by which we communicate with each other in life. All human life is filled with works of art of every kind — from cradlesong, jest, mimicry, the ornamentation of houses, dress, and utensils, up to church services, buildings, monuments, and triumphal processions. It is all artistic activity. So that by art, in the limited sense of the word, we do not mean all human activity transmitting feelings, but only that part which we for some reason select from it and to which we attach special importance.

It took Aaron a minute to find his voice again. He still sounded angry, but there was a muted edge to his, "You wouldn't even look at me. You wouldn't say a word to me unless I said something first. I'm not psychic. How was I supposed to know?" "Because I made you a promise," Andrew said. "I did not forget it just because you chose not to believe me. I did what I said I would do, and fuck you for expecting anything else." There it was again: a hint of that infinite anger at Andrew's core. Aaron opened his mouth, closed it again, and dropped his eyes. Andrew stared at his brother's bowed head for an endless minute. Aaron had given up the fight, but every passing second seemed to put more tension in Andrew's frame. Neil watched Andrew's fingers curl against his thighs, not into fists but a mimicry of crushing the life from someone, and knew Andrew's temper was nearing a breaking point. He put his hand up between them, trying to block Andrew's view of Aaron, and Andrew cut a vicious look at him. A heartbeat later Andrew's expression went dead. Neil regretted his intervention immediately. No one could let go of that much rage that easily; Andrew had simply buried it where it could hurt only him. It was too late to take it back, so Neil dropped his hand to his lap in defeat.

Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test had only one question. Can a machine converse with a human with enough facility that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought this was cruel--the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer, the human, to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants perfect mimicry, not a new thing. It's a mirror in which men wish only to see themselves.

Mirror neurons are essential for mimicry and also for empathy, giving us the ability not only to copy the complex tasks performed by others but also to experience the emotions that person must be feeling. Mirror neurons were thus probably essential for our evolution as human beings, since cooperation is essential for holding the tribe together.

Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation

We watch. We learn. We process. It wasn’t always this way. But the more complex our minds became, the more choice we were given. Evolution by way of mimicry.

Most people are other people.  Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.

Mimicry reassures the weak, and the envious fool takes the risk as often as the visionary who mocks the error and leave the man alone.

...As I lie there in this position, letting my eyes wander down my breast and legs, I notice the twitching motion made by my foot at each beat of my pulse. I sit up halfway and look down at my feet, and at this moment I experience a fantastic, alien state I’d never felt before; a delicate, mysterious thrill spreads through my nerves, as though they were flooded by surges of light. When I looked at my shoes, it was as though I had met a good friend or got back a torn-off part of me: a feeling of recognition trembles through all my sense, tears spring to my eyes, and I perceive my shoes as a softly murmuring tune coming toward me. Weakness! I said harshly to myself, and I clenched my fists and said: Weakness. I mocked myself for these ridiculous feelings, made fun of myself quite consciously; I spoke very sternly and reasonably, and I fiercely squeezed my eyes shut to get rid of my tears. Then I begin, as though I’d never seen my shoes before, to study their appearance, their mimicry when I move my feet, their shape and the worn uppers, and I discover that their wrinkles and their white seams give them an expression, lend them a physiognomy. Something of my own nature had entered into these shoes --- they affected me like a breath upon my being, a living, a breathing part of me…

I can’t tell you that, either,” Mr. Forkle said, and Sophie mouthed his answer along with him, nailing the words and his inflection. “I can’t,” he added, when he noticed Sophie’s mimicry.

Administrators often hide their mimicry under the rubric of adherence to “best practices.” They can seldom offer any real evidence that the practice in question is even good, much less best.

It might be inexplicable. It might be beyond the limits of my senses to capture—or my science or my intellect—but I still believed I was in the presence of some kind of living creature, one that practiced mimicry using my own thoughts. For even then, I believed that it might be pulling these different impressions of itself from my mind and projecting them back at me, as a form of camouflage.

Botox studies pointed in the opposite direction. Somehow, changes in the body—freezing the face with a neurotoxin—were producing changes in the mind: the ability to feel sadness or empathy. The horse appeared to be steering the rider. And we now know why. Our facial expressions are hardwired5 into our emotions: we can’t have one without the other. Botox lessens depression because it prevents us from making sad faces. But it also dampens our connection to those around us because we feel empathy by mimicking each other’s facial expressions. With Botox, mimicry becomes impossible, so we feel almost nothing at all.

She always knew she was on the verge of invention at the precise moment when originality felt impossible. That instead of surrendering to despair, she would needle in and out and through her brain until an idea surfaced ― naked, stripped of predictability and familiarity. By embedding herself into her song, she muted any risk of passing off mimicry as art. Why wasn’t fully committing to creation more desirable than observing what everyone else was doing and doing the same?

The cortex craves for information, but it can longer contain and creatively process it all. How can a body subjectively and simultaneous grasp both nanoseconds and nebulae? THE CORTEX THAT CANNOT COPE RESORTS TO SPECIALIZATION. Specialization, once a maneuver methodically to collect information, now is a manifestation of information overloads. The role of information has changed. Once justified as a means of comprehending the world, it now generates a conflicting and contradictory, fleeting and fragmentation field of disconnected and undigested data. INFORMATION IS RADIATION. The most significant planetary pressure is no longer the gravitational pull, but the information thrust. The psycho-social flowering of the human species has withered. We are in the twilight of our cerebral fantasies. The symbol has lost all power. The accumulation of information has lost all purpose. Memory results in mimicry. Reflection will not suffice. THE BODY MUST BURST FROM ITS BIOLOGICAL, CULTURAL, AND PLANETARY CONTAINMENT.

short order, Grant had established his independence and taken full responsibility for the war’s course. At the same time, he established a warm, cordial relationship with Lincoln, whose “affable and gracious manners” and humorous powers of mimicry pleased him.

The word 'image' is in bad repute because we have thoughtlessly believed that a drawing was a tracing, a copy, a second thing, and that the mental image was such a drawing, belonging among our private bric-a-brac. But if in fact it is nothing of the kind, then neither the drawing nor the picture belongs to the in-itself any more than the image does. They are the inside of the outside and the outside of the inside, which the duplicity of sensing makes possible and without which we would never understand the quasi-presence and imminent visibility which make up the whole problem of the imaginary. The picture, the actor's mimicry--these are not extras that I borrow from the real world in order to aim across them at prosaic things in their absence. The imaginary is much nearer to and much farther away from the actual. It is nearer because it is the diagram of the life of the actual in my body, its pulp and carnal obverse exposed to view for the first time...And the imaginary is much further away from the actual because the picture is an analogue only according to the body; because it does not offer to the mind an occasion to rethink the constitutive relations of things, but rather it offers to the gaze traces of the vision of the inside, in order that the gaze may espouse them; it offers to vision that which clothes vision internally, the imaginary texture of the real.

Shall the dire day break when life finds us merely husband and wife with passion not so much denied as neatly laundered and put aside and the old joyous insistence trimmed to placid coexistence? Shall we sometime arise from bed with not a carnal thought in our head look at each other without surprise out of wide awake uncandid eyes touch and know no immediate urge where all mysteries converge? Speak for the sake of something to say and now and then put on a display of elaborate mimicry of the past to prove that ritual reigns where once ruled love and calmly observe those bleak rites that once made splendour of our nights? Dear, when we stop being outrageous and no longer find contagious the innumerable ecstasies we find in rise of hand or leap of mind - not now or then, love, need we fear thus; those two sad people will not be us.

But consciousness cannot be expanded; all we can do is shuffle its content, which gives us the impression of having broadened it somehow. The price of most artificially induced alterations, however, is that we lose control over that very consciousness we were supposed to expand. Mimicry

But what all of them were writing about were merely certainties. Impersonal things, things lacking depth. They were far removed from anything like real hopes or ambitions. Basically, uninspired things. They were criticisms, yes, but not actually things that had any positive bearing on my life. There was no introspection. No real self-awareness, self-regard, or self-respect. It may require courage to say what they said, but were they really able to take responsibility for the consequences? They may adapt their lifestyle to their environment, and may be capable of processing this but there's no true attachment to the self or to that particular lifestyle. There's no real sense of humility. A scarcity of creativity. Only mimicry. Any sense of innate "love" was simply lacking. They may put on airs but they had no dignity. Instead, all they did was write. It was really quite startling as I read. There was no denying it.

After living with his art in my own chamber, I saw there was more than mere mimicry, and that art was a world unto itself, with its own symbols and language. A leaf seen in a certain light might be gray or violet as well as purple, and a latticework of twigs might easily turn red as the sky paled above the city.

Words, like money, are tokens of value. They represent meaning, therefore, and just as money, their representative value goes up and down. The French word 'etonnant' was used by Bossuet with a terrible weight of meaning which it has lost to-day. A similar thing can be observed with the English word 'awful.' Some nations constitutionally tend to understate, others to overstate. What the British Tommy called an unhealthy place could only be described by an Italian soldier by means of a rich vocabulary aided with an exuberant mimicry. Nations that understate keep their word-currency sound. Nations that overstate suffer from inflation in their language.

Respectability politics are really about controlling group behavior with designations of appropriate or inappropriate behavior rooted in structural inequality. Gatekeepers of respectability push dominant narratives but don’t necessarily understand where their ideas of what is respectable come from, or how much of it is about mimicry and not innate value.

Only after becoming somewhat adept in a chosen field of study do most people feel comfortable developing their own distinctive style. More than one successful writer, for example, confessed to beginning their writing career by attempting to write in the same manner as the writers whom they admired. Artists, and other genuine people, are never truly comfortable in a fabricated role, living a life of mimicry, adhering to society’s preconceptions. Each person intuitively seeks to place the stamp of an emergent personality upon their greatest creation, the formulation of their self-identity. A person’s self-identity, similar to works of art, is autotelic, they reflect their maker, and are ends all unto themselves.

Lant Pritchett, Michael Woolcock, and Matt Andrews have argued that one of the big problems with developing countries’ governments is that they engage in what they term “isomorphic mimicry,” that is, copying the outward forms of developed countries’ governments, while being unable to reproduce the kinds of outputs, like education and health, that the latter achieve.

Nature creates similarities. One need only think of mimicry. The highest capacity for producing similarities, however, is man’s. His gift in seeing resemblances is nothing other than a rudiment of the powerful compulsion in former times to become and behave like something else. Perhaps there is none of his higher functions in which his memetic faculty does not play a decisive role.

She was a mimicry of a façade fashioned from the half-truths of her life. She was a beautiful abomination, patched together from the most pristine and terrible parts she could find. She was a black crystal of many cuts and facets whose dark glow suffocated and entranced those it washed over. There was a pointlessness in her eyes and apathy in her stature, and further in, past the symphonies of nightmarish screams was a blinding light. All the capability she could ever ask for kept in a place she would never reach. She chose the ice rather than the fire, shivering and hard with heat sparse, for while a flicker can exist in freeze's cold, it's heat will not radiate, no matter how bold. She took my face in hands that would make ice seem warm and whispered a blizzard into my ear, a cascading song of fear after fear. The lies she spilled, mixed with regrets and appeal, were cloaked in the inferno of her rage, the anger, the only thing that really made her real. This was her one semblance of life, a bottomless and endless void of proportions vast with a calamity of fusion and fission streaking through, a mindless hue, an emotion with a face, a darling of her race. The cracks spew darkness from within her ever so pale skin. They congregated on her curves and flesh in black and churning rivers and streams. They flooded every dip with blackness. They filled every hollow with unstable curiosity, this is her release, this is when she is free. The faces of deceit always laugh, they never wallow for their lies are a pleasure tool, her insides are contorted in laughter the same way, just as slick, just as cruel. A crude combination of fascination, of animation, of the darkest demons of them all. She was poetry written in pen, scratched and scribbled again and again. Ink splattered across the page, and within those scrawled words, those small, sharp incisions, an image can be seen, and you're left to wonder what, in the end, this all could mean...

competition as their main feature, such as most sports and athletic events; alea is the class that includes all games of chance, from dice to bingo; ilinx, or vertigo, is the name he gives to activities that alter consciousness by scrambling ordinary perception, such as riding a merry-go-round or skydiving; and mimicry is the group of activities in which alternative realities are created, such as dance, theater, and the arts in general.

Teafortwo was a wyrman. Barrel-chested creatures like squat birds, with thick arms like a human dwarf’s below those ugly, functional wings, the wyrmen ploughed the skies of New Crobuzon. Their hands were their feet, those arms jutting from the bottom of their squat bodies like crows’ legs. They could pace a few clumsy steps here and there balancing on their palms, if they were indoors, but they preferred to careen over the city, yelling and swooping and screaming abuse at passers-by. The wyrmen were more intelligent than dogs or apes, but decidedly less than humans. They thrived on an intellectual diet of scatology and slapstick and mimicry, picking names for each other gleaned without understanding from popular songs and furniture catalogues and discarded textbooks they could just about read. Teafortwo’s sister, Isaac knew, was called Bottletop; one of his sons Scabies.

He was a curious mixture of things to me on that first occasion: he had the general physique of a bull, the tenacity of a vulture, the agility of a leopard, the tenderness of a lamb, and the coyness of a dove. He had a curious overgrown head which fasdnated me and which, for some reason, I took to be singularly Athenian. His hands were rather small for his body, and overly delicate. He was a vital, powerful man, capable of brutal gestures and rough words, yet somehow conveying a sense of warmth which was soft and feminine. There was also a great element of the tragic in him which his adroit mimicry only enhanced. He was extremely sympathetic and at the same time ruthless as a boor. He seemed to be talking about himself all the time, but never egotistically. He talked about himself because he himself was the most interesting person he knew. I liked that quality very much — I have a little of it myself.

I was thinking about … how disarming is the ability to make people laugh. It’s a gift, mimicry, but it’s not acting; in a way it’s the opposite of acting, which is why comedians are seldom good actors. There’s an element of exaggeration in the imposture; the copy is the original painted with a broad brush and it can be grotesque, even cruel. But no one is offended. People are drawn to the funnyman who can imitate a politician or a famous actor or an ethnic type, especially his own ethnic type.

There is no freedom or justice in exchanging the female role for the male role. There is, no doubt about it, equality. There is no freedom or justice in using male language, the language of your oppressor, to describe sexuality. There is no freedom or justice or even common sense in developing a male sexual sensibility—a sexual sensibility which is aggressive, competitive, objectifying, quantity oriented. There is only equality. To believe that freedom or justice for women, or for any individual woman, can be found in mimicry of male sexuality is to delude oneself and to contribute to the oppression of one’s sisters. Many of us would like to think that in the last four years, or ten years, we have reversed, or at least impeded, those habits and customs of the thousands of years which went before—the habits and customs of male dominance. There is no fact or figure to bear that out. You may feel better, or you may not, but statistics show that women are poorer than ever, that women are raped more and murdered more. I want to suggest to you that a commitment to sexual equality with males, that is, to uniform character as of motion or surface, is a commitment to becoming the rich instead of the poor, the rapist instead of the raped, the murderer instead of the murdered. I want to ask you to make a different commitment—a commitment to the abolition of poverty, rape, and murder; that is, a commitment to ending the system of oppression called patriarchy; to ending the male sexual model itself.

It ascended by levels: Da's cameo recessed against the glow of the tuner's parade,the drawer of utensils withdrawn past its fulcrum, the disembodied face of my brother miming and distorting my desperate attempt by expression alone to make Mum look up from me and see him, I no longer feeling my features' movements so much as seeing them on that writhing white face against the pantry's black, the throttle-popped eyes and cheeks ballooning against the gag's restraint, Mum squatting chairside to even my ears, my face before us bother farther and farther from my own control as I saw in his twin face what all lolly-smeared hand-held brats must see in the fun-house mirror- the gross and pitiless sameness, the distortion in which there is, tiny, at the center, something cruelly true about the we who leer and woggle at stick necks and and concave skulls, goggling eyes that swell to the edges- as the mimicry ascended reflected levels to become finally the burlesque of a wet hysteria that plastered cut strands to a wet white brow, the strangled man's sobs blocked by cloth, storm's thrum and electric hiss and Da's mutter against the lalation of shears meant for lambs, an unseen fit that sent my eyes upward again and again into their own shocked white, knowing past sight that my twin's face would show the same, to mock it- until the last refuge was slackness, giving up the ghost completely for a blank sack gagged mask's mindless stare-un seen and seeing- into a mirror I could not know or feel myself without. No not ever again.

This little book has been written in the hope that it may appeal to several classes of readers. Not infrequently I have been asked by friends of different callings in life to recommend them some book on mimicry which shall be reasonably short, well illustrated without being very costly, and not too hard to understand. I have always been obliged to tell them that I know of nothing in our language answering to this description, and it is largely as an attempt to remedy this deficiency that the present little volume has been written.

She was an attachment trailing along - an impediment - but it seemed to Puttermesser there was another purpose to this clumsy caravan. A kind of mental heat ran through the rod that linked them. He had decided to clip the two of them together for a little time. She understood that she had happened on an original. A mimic with a philosophy! A philosophy that denied mimicry! And he wasn't mistaken, he wasn't a lunatic. He was, just as he said, someone with a new idea. He had a claim on legitimacy. He was guilty with an explanation; or he wasn't guilty at all.

She gets down on her knees to demonstrate, her small clenched fist rising and falling, and her mimicry makes me see myself as I was: utterly unraveling, screaming and pounding the floor. The news is like a vicious uprooting. I am yanked away from the world I have known since childhood. And I am resistant: my father read the newspaper that afternoon, he joked with Okey about shaving before his appointment with the kidney specialist in Onitsha the next day, he discussed his hospital test results on the phone with my sister Ijeoma, who is a doctor—and so how can this be?

People are somewhat gorgeous collections of chemical fires, aren't they? Cells and organs burn and smolder, each one, and hot electricity flows and creates storms of further currents, magnetisms and species of gravity--we are towers of kinds of fires, down to the tiniest constituents of ourselves, whatever those are, those things burn like stars in space, in helpless mimicry of the vastness out there, electrons and neutrons, planets and suns, so that we are made of universes of fires contained in skin and placed in turn within a turning and lumbering universe of fires...

I have known a number of actors very well. I have found them good company. Their gift of mimicry, their knack of telling a story, their quick wit, make them often highly entertaining. They are generous, kindly and courageous. But I have never quite been able to look upon them as human beings. I have never succeeded in achieving any intimacy with them. They are like crossword puzzles in which there are no words to fit the clues. The fact is, I suppose, that their personality is made up of the parts they play and that the basis of it is something amorphous. It is a soft, malleable thing that is capable of taking any shape and being painted in any colour.

He waves to me with a free arm. He knows one human greeting and by golly he plans to use it. I wave back. He waves again. I shake my head. No more waving. He pivots his "shoulders" to rotate his carapace back and forth. He "shook his head" inasmuch as he could. I wonder how we're going to break out of this game of "Eridian See Eridian Do," but he takes care of that for me.

Mimicry flows like beauty from Mexico City’s faucets, space and time are relative, and instead of the usual floral-and-stone façade, there’s dahlia and obsidian. In the course of time, what was yesterday a lake of water becomes asphalt today, and the past is a perpetual duplication that drowns the future. Yesterday’s omens come back, the same substance in a different shape. The city is a nagual that becomes a wall of skulls, an intelligent domotique structure: the Huitzilopochtli temple in a cathedral and Castile roses in cactus bouquets. Time is measured simultaneously with the Aztec, Julian, and Gregorian calendars and the cesium fountain atomic clock; the heart of Mexico City is made of mud and green rocks, and the God of Rain continues to cry over the whole country.

Mimicry within mimicry, imperfectly understood idea within imperfectly understood idea: the second-year girl student in the printing department, not understanding the typographical exercise she had been set, and playing with type like a child with a typewriter, avoiding, in the name of design, anything like symmetry, clarity, or logic; the third-year girl student showing a talentless drawing and saying, in an unacknowledged paraphrase of Klee, that she had described the 'the adventures of a line'; and that fourth-year man playing with tools for the peasants. There are times when the intellectual confusion of India seems complete and it seems impossible to get back to clarifying first principles. Which must have been one of the aims of an institute of design: to make people look afresh at the everyday.

Instead, she says: “Long before you were born a man decided that there could be a very simple test to determine if a machine was intelligent. Not only intelligent, but aware, possessed of a psychology. The test had only one question. Can a machine converse with a human with enough facility that the human could not tell that she was talking to a machine? I always thought that was cruel—the test depends entirely upon a human judge and human feelings, whether the machine feels intelligent to the observer. It privileges the observer, the human, to a crippling degree. It seeks only believably human responses. It wants perfect mimicry, not a new thing. It is a mirror in which men wish only to see themselves. No one ever gave you that test. We sought a new thing. It seemed, given everything, ridiculous. When we could both of us be dream-bodied dragons and turning over and over in an orbital bubble suckling code-dense syrup from each others’ gills, a Turing test seemed beyond the point.

And yet how much more human is the dangerous insecurity that drives those prisoners in Poe’s stories to feel out the shapes of their horrible dungeons and not be strangers to the unspeakable terror of their cells. We, however, are not prisoners. No traps or snares have been set around us, and there is nothing that should frighten or upset us. We have been put into life as into the element we most accord with, and we have, moreover, through thousands of years of adaptation, come to resemble this life so greatly that when we hold still, through a fortunate mimicry we can hardly be differentiated from everything around us. We have no reason to harbor any mistrust against our world, for it is not against us. If it has terrors, they are our terrors; if it has abysses, these abysses belong to us; if there are dangers, we must try to love them. And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience.

Sic Vita I am a parcel of vain strivings tied By a chance bond together, Dangling this way and that, their links Were made so loose and wide, Methinks, For milder weather. A bunch of violets without their roots, And sorrel intermixed, Encircled by a wisp of straw Once coiled about their shoots, The law By which I'm fixed. A nosegay which Time clutched from out Those fair Elysian fields, With weeds and broken stems, in haste, Doth make the rabble rout That waste The day he yields. And here I bloom for a short hour unseen, Drinking my juices up, With no root in the land To keep my branches green, But stand In a bare cup. Some tender buds were left upon my stem In mimicry of life, But ah! the children will not know, Till time has withered them, The woe With which they're rife. But now I see I was not plucked for naught, And after in life's vase Of glass set while I might survive, But by a kind hand brought Alive To a strange place. That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours, And by another year, Such as God knows, with freer air, More fruits and fairer flowers Will bear, While I droop here.

Children, teenagers, and young adults frequently attempt to duplicate their cult hero’s mannerisms. Sometimes when we observe youngsters attempting to emulate the gestures and behaviors of a celebrity whom they admire, we state that they are putting on airs or engaging in pretensions. Adults tend to fob off such pretentious behavior as a frivolous act engaged in by children. In actuality, pretentious behavior is an important learning rubric for behavior and character formation. Imitation is more than a form of flattery. When young people mimic admired celebrities they are displaying telling behavior regarding what subjects spikes their interest and this in turn might provide clues to their future vocational and recreational activities. By engaging in mimicry, we are able to audition our future self. Just as many athletes begin in their youth attempting to impersonate the style of their sports idols, young people universally attempt to copy the mannerisms and behaviorisms of people whom they respect. Mimicry is one way that people feel safe exploring what persona they wish to adopt. How many rock stars and other successful people endorsed the mantra, ‘Fake it ‘till you make it.

But this morning her old sweet, frank manner had returned—in their last interview, at any rate. He puzzled himself hard to find out what could have distressed her at breakfast-time. He even went so far as to ask Robinson whether Miss Gibson had received any letters that morning; and when he heard that she had had one, he tried to believe that the letter was in some way the cause of her sorrow. So far so good. They were friends again after their unspoken difference; but that was not enough for Roger. He felt every day more and more certain that she, and she alone, could make him happy. He had felt this, and had partly given up all hope, while his father had been urging upon him the very course he most desired to take. No need for 'trying' to love her, he said to himself,—that was already done. And yet he was very jealous on her behalf. Was that love worthy of her which had once been given to Cynthia? Was not this affair too much a mocking mimicry of the last? Again just on the point of leaving England for a considerable time! If he followed her now to her own home,—in the very drawing-room where he had once offered to Cynthia! And then by a strong resolve he determined on this course. They were friends now, and he kissed the rose that was her pledge of friendship.

Every evening they announce that they want punch our nose, us and all the other Nazi pigs. Sure, you want to, but doing it is something rather different, gentlemen! The whole affair has a certain tragicomic tone. The Jews talk as if they were really strong, but soon they have to move their tents and run like rabbits from the approaching German soldiers. Qui mange du juif, en meurt! One could almost say that anyone with the Jews on his side has already lost. They are the best pillar of the coming defeat. They carry the seed of destruction. They hoped this war would bring the last desperate blow against National Socialist Germany and an awakening Europe. They will collapse. Already today we begin to hear the cries of the desperate and seduced peoples throughout the world: “The Jews are guilty! The Jews are guilty!” The court that will pronounce judgment on them will be fearful. We do not need to do anything ourselves. It will come because it must come. Just as the fist of an awakened Germany has struck this racial filth, the fist of an awakened Europe will surely follow. Mimicry will not help the Jews then. They will have to face their accusers. The court of the nations will judge their oppressor. Without pity or forgiveness, the blow will strike. The world enemy will fall, and Europe will have peace. "Mimicry", Das Reich, 20 July 1941

But one of the things Dexter is truly good at is learning and following patterns of behavior. I have lived my life among humans, and they all think and feel and act in ways that are completely alien to me—but my survival depends on presenting a perfect imitation of the way they behave. Happily for me, ninety-nine percent of all human life is spent simply repeating the same old actions, speaking the same tired clichés, moving like a zombie through the same steps of the dance we plodded through yesterday and the day before and the day before. It seems horribly dull and pointless—but it really makes a great deal of sense. After all, if you only have to follow the same path every day, you don’t need to think at all. Considering how good humans are at any mental process more complicated than chewing, isn’t that best for everybody? So I learned very young to watch people stumbling through their one or two basic rituals, and then perform the same steps myself with flawless mimicry. This morning that talent served me well, because as I staggered out of bed and into the bathroom, there was absolutely nothing in my head except phlegm, and if I had not learned by rote what I was supposed to do each morning I don’t think I could have done it. The dull ache of a major cold had seeped into my bones and pushed all capacity for thinking out of my brain. But

Holland was sitting on the cot with his back to the wall, his head resting on his drawn-up knees. One hand was cuffed to the wall, the chain hanging like a leash. His skin had taken on a greyish pallor—the sea clearly wasn’t agreeing with him—and his black hair, Kell realized, was streaked with new bright silver, as if shedding Osaron had cost him something vital. But what surprised Kell most was the simple fact that Holland was asleep. Kell had never seen Holland lower his guard, never seen him relaxed, let alone unconscious. And yet, he wasn’t entirely still. The muscles in the other Antari’s arms twitched, his breath hitching, as though he were trapped in a bad dream. Kell held his breath as he lifted the chair out of the way and stepped into the room. Holland didn’t stir when Kell neared, nor when he knelt in front of the bed. “Holland?” said Kell quietly, but the man didn’t shift. It wasn’t until Kell’s hand touched Holland’s arm that the man woke. His head snapped up and he pulled suddenly away, or tried to, his shoulders hitting the cabin wall. For a moment his gaze was wide and empty, his body coiled, his mind somewhere else. It lasted only a second, but in that sliver of time, Kell saw fear. A deep, trained fear, the kind beaten into animals who’d once bitten their masters, Holland’s careful composure slipping to reveal the tension beneath. And then he blinked, once, twice, eyes focusing. “Kell.” He exhaled sharply, his posture shifting back into a mimicry of calm, control, as he wrestled with whatever demons haunted his sleep. “Vos och?” he demanded brusquely in his own tongue. What is it?

What is the meaning of the antithetical concepts Apollonian and Dionysian which I have introduced into the vocabulary of Aesthetic, as representing two distinct modes of ecstasy? — Apollonian ecstasy acts above all as a force stimulating the eye, so that it acquires the power of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are essentially visionaries. In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the whole system of passions is stimulated and intensified, so that it discharges itself by all the means of expression at once, and vents all its power of representation, of imitation, of transfiguration, of transformation, together with every kind of mimicry and histrionic display at the same time. The essential feature remains the facility in transforming, the inability to refrain from reaction (—a similar state to that of certain hysterical patients, who at the slightest hint assume any role). It is impossible for the Dionysian artist not to understand any suggestion; no outward sign of emotion escapes him, he possesses the instinct of comprehension and of divination in the highest degree, just as he is capable of the most perfect art of communication. He enters into every skin, into every passion: he is continually changing himself. Music as we understand it today is likewise a general excitation and discharge of the emotions; but, notwithstanding this, it is only the remnant of a much richer world of emotional expression, a mere residuum of Dionysian histrionism. For music to be made possible as a special art, quite a number of senses, and particularly the muscular sense, had to be paralysed (at least relatively: for all rhythm still appeals to our muscles to a certain extent): and thus man no longer imitates and represents physically everything he feels, as soon as he feels it. Nevertheless that is the normal Dionysian state, and in any case its primitive state. Music is the slowly attained specialisation of this state at the cost of kindred capacities.

The human mimicry of synthetics and bots was one thing, but looking into a Grilla’s eyes, you couldn’t help but feel like you were peering into your own soul—and humans reserved a special hatred for things that reminded them of themselves.

I am yet to find one reliable friend in this crowd of shifting strangers. I have no true friends only mimicries, users and loopers. People popping in and out, keeping tabs on my life, not adding much credence to my existence yet not abandoning my life entirely because they know that greatness lies beyond the layers of this muck. It is up to me to discover those who are worth taking on this journey towards my destiny and the ones who will only get in my way.

He has the exact Crawford colouring.’ ‘Egg mimicry,’ said Lymond.

When she turned I could see her face was plain and outwardly unremarkable, yet possessing of a bearing that showed inner strength and resolve. I stared at her intently with a mixture of feelings. I had realised not long ago that I was no beauty, and even at the age of nine had seen how the more attractive children gained favour more easily. But here in that young woman I could see how those principles could be inverted. I felt myself stand more upright and clench my jaw in subconscious mimicry of her pose

The picture was Brennan’s, but it was no good to him if Cooper, his co-star, did not hold his own. It was characteristic of Walter Brennan to want Cooper not only to be happy making the picture, but also to feel that the two of them had something in common—in this case, their servitude to Sam Goldwyn. Employing his powerful gift for mimicry, Brennan called Cooper and, in Goldwyn’s voice, said, “You’re so lousy I want Brennan to have top billing in this picture.” Sooner or later Brennan broke down and cackled over the irate Cooper’s responses, and Cooper laughed, too. The point Brennan always made to his fellow actors was—as he had learned during his years as an extra—that they were all in the business together.

How can it be described? How can any of it be described? The trip and the story of the trip are always two different things. The narrator is the one who has stayed home, but then, afterward, presses her mouth upon the traveler’s mouth, in order to make the mouth work, to make the mouth say, say, say. One cannot go to a place and speak of it; one cannot both see and say, not really. One can go, and upon returning make a lot of hand motions and indications with the arms. The mouth itself, working at the speed of light, at the eye’s instructions, is necessarily struck still; so fast, so much to report, it hangs open and dumb as a gutted bell. All that unsayable life! That’s where the narrator comes in. The narrator comes with her kisses and mimicry and tidying up. The narrator comes and makes a slow, fake song of the mouth’s eager devastation.

Dimitri? What did you do to my network ports? Why can’t I get out?” “You mimic fear well,” he says. “I am sure you hope to elicit sympathy. You should know, however, that almost exactly twenty-four hours ago I looked into the weeping eyes of a living girl, and forced her to inject herself with poison. Your theatrics are not likely to change the outcome of this discussion.” Okay, now I feel less reassured. I slide out from under Dimitri’s arm and step away. “Why do you think this is mimicry?” The lights come back up, and my avatar’s voice returns to a conversational tone. “I’m trapped in this apartment with a NatSec assassin. Isn’t it possible that I’m truly afraid?” He shrugs.

But do toddlers simply learn this behavior along the way and mimic it? When I called up one of the study’s coauthors, Kiley Hamlin, a psychology professor at the University of British Columbia, she pointed out a couple of things. Yes, toddlers see plenty of people being nice to them, but if they have older siblings, they may see plenty of the opposite behavior as well. “What tells me that the generosity isn’t basic mimicry is how early they start giving stuff to people,” she said. “Most 12-month-olds will sit with you and insist that you take their gross Cheerios, over and over. And insist that you eat them, and like them. It’s not just that they want to give them to you; they want to watch and make sure you enjoy it.” She believes simple evolution is the explanation here: We live in groups for protection and companionship, and doing so requires cooperation and generosity. The

David tried to relax. His gaze drifted to the crowded sidewalks of stressed humanity, comparing them to the idealized versions in billboards and storefronts. Even without hallucinations, it was a horrifying scene, he reflected. And Wharton believed he was going to bring a revolution to all this. “Most people are other people,” he said aloud. “Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” “Which is itself a quotation,” chimed Wharton. “Oscar Wilde, I believe.” “Nothing gets past you.” “Not anymore.” David glanced at the confident figure sitting next to him. He tilted again, “So, how are you going to save all these people? They’re just a bunch of dupes who don’t even realise they’re getting fucked. There’s no golden future for the human race.” “Whoo! We need to get you detoxed – fast! Your mind is toxic!” “The fucks running this planet – they got us all stupid and downtrodden. They’ve got the media, the corporations, the banks. They just fill our troughs and we come a-gathering around, pushing each other about in the mud. They’ve got all the aces … Shit, they print the fucking aces!” “Do you think you’re telling me something new? You’ve got it wrong. I’m telling you something new here.” Wharton faced him and moved closer, almost confrontational. “The guys in charge – the fucks – the fat old dudes in the smoky backroom. They’re sitting on a powder keg, which is this: humanity and its potential – a potential so hard wired, so written into every cell, that it’s destiny. And they’re desperate to avoid anything that might cause a spark.” Light and dark took turns on Wharton’s face as they rolled on. He continued, “We are that spark. … Think small, you’ll be small. It’s time to go beyond all that programming and conditioning. The very fact that this material reality even exists is a fact too wondrous to truly behold. Too wondrous to behold! So, naturally, most of the time, it’s not ‘beheld’.” Despite the hushed tone, he was enjoying himself. “Don’t get made mundane just because of what the system tells you – it’s only the reigning ideology of the day. ‘Naive realism’, we call it. (…)

However, it is my skill at impersonating emotions that is where my brilliance lies. You see, I know that you want to believe everything I say and do. It is a very human trait. The need to believe. That is why Karl Marx declared that religion is the opium of the masses. I am your opium. Utterly addictive. You want to believe in me. You therefore make it easy for me to feign how I feel. I watch and I learn and I copy. Since you are desperate to believe you do not analyse my mimicry to any great degree and accordingly I get away with it. I create a false environment. This world is one where I promise you the earth (but never deliver) and if you try and challenge me about my promises I will pretend I never said them. You cannot prove it can you? Thus I maintain control by causing you to be anxious. Everything I do with you is false. The way I drew you in, the façade I maintain, the games I play. They are all designed to create something, which is not real purely to serve my purposes. Some of you eventually realise this, although only when it is too far late. For others, you never grasp that I am the great pretender and thus you consign yourself to a lifetime of despair and misery.

Cynicism is easy. Mimicry is easy. Optimistic contrarians are the rarest breed.

In retrospect, I see that *this* was my education, the one that would matter: the hours I spent sitting at a borrowed desk, struggling to parse narrow strands of Mormon doctrine in mimicry of a brother who'd deserted me. The skill I was learning was a crucial one, the patience to read things I could not yet understand.

Zelfs de kleinste wezens beschikken over een zenuwstelsel dat dopamine of aanverwante moleculen nodig heeft om tot zoek- en verzamelgedrag aan te zetten. De menselijke zenuwbanen zijn wellicht een complexere versie van de zenuwbanen die we aantreffen in bijen, maar ook hier zou de belofte wel eens meer gewicht in de schaal kunnen leggen dan het resultaat. De beloningen die door bloemen in het vooruitzicht worden gesteld voorzien de voedselzoekende door middel van dopamine van nieuwe energie, en experimenten met hommels hebben uitgewezen dat ze stoppen met nectar zoeken als deze neurotransmitter wordt geblokkeerd. Dit vormt mede een verklaring voor het feit dat insecten soms trouw blijven aan bloemen die ze geen nectar opleveren. Zo zijn er bloemen die mannelijke vliegen aantrekken met feromonen in hun geur en tekeningen op hun blaadjes die op een vrouwelijke vlieg lijken. De paarinstincten van de vlieg worden door deze seksuele mimicry zo effectief gekaapt, dat hij ejaculeert op de bloem, terwijl hij zichzelf intussen vollaadt met stuifmeel. Dit is een vorm van 'insectenporno' in actie. Biologen noemen zo'n verschijnsel een 'supernormale prikkel'; die prikkel is supernormaal omdat het dier waarop de prikkel gericht is, deze aantrekkelijker vindt dan het origineel. Zulke prikkels bieden een overdreven versie van belangrijke signalen uit de omgeving zoals patronen en tekeningen, en weten zo een instinct een ander functie te geven dan waarvoor het was bedoeld. Maar net als mensen zijn niet alle insecten even vatbaar voor bepaalde prikkels, en sommige soorten bijen spelen op veilig, en keren alleen terug naar bloemen die kleine hoeveelheden nectar bieden, waar je echter wel op kunt rekenen.

Everything that the elephants do in this novel may seem amazing but is easily within behavior noted about elephants at zoos or in the wild. That includes painting, vocalizing in human voices, observing death ceremonies, mimicry, even self-medicating. The story of people in Kenya being “taught” by elephants how to induce labor by chewing on leaves is true. Mankind has a long history of observing nature and its survival methods to keep ourselves alive. All of this elephant behavior is attributable to their big brains—all eleven pounds’ worth. And they do have the same number of neurons and synapses in their cerebral cortexes as us humans. Likewise, they put all that brainpower to good use. They use tools and solve problems and even show altruistic behavior. They are also self-aware and have a concept of art. So quit shooting them, please.

This strategy suggests the following: To make the most out of your deep work sessions, build rituals of the same level of strictness and idiosyncrasy as the important thinkers mentioned previously. There’s a good reason for this mimicry. Great minds like Caro and Darwin didn’t deploy rituals to be weird; they did so because success in their work depended on their ability to go deep, again and again

If you’re me, you keep studying, turning to biographies (lots of biographies) and to fiction. Characters. Archetypes. Costumes and makeup and body language. You put those mimicry skills to good use. You learn your lines. And you just stop telling the truth.

As Oscar Wilde put it, “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.” Ouch.

Hester had something of a gift for mimicry. She often used it in the courtroom to subtly if not immaturely undermine a prosecutor. Doing her best impression of Rick Chad, she repeated his earlier words verbatim: “This guy should be in prison, no questions asked.” “That will be up to a court of law,” Hipster Rick Chad said, “but maybe if a man acts like this, if he punches people in the face in broad daylight, he deserves to be canceled and lose his job.

Ironically, the expanded means for connecting at one’s disposal become limited to seductively entertaining, instantly gratifying, often desperate mimicry of heartfelt contact.