The Paper Menagerie

Text in black are quotes; text in green are my notes. I sometimes write in Spanish.

• “All life is an experiment.” #

• People tended to have more to talk about at the beginning of the week and the end of the week, either about what they had done over the weekend or what they were about to do the next weekend. There was not so much to talk about on Wednesdays. #

• Centillion has put us in little bubbles, where all we see and hear are echoes of ourselves, and we become ever more stuck in our existing beliefs and exaggerated in our inclinations. We stop asking questions and accept Tilly’s judgment on everything. #

• “Impossible. I shielded it. It couldn’t have recorded anything.” “But you left it on your desk, where it could still make use of its accelerometer. It detected and recorded the vibrations from your typing. There’s a very distinctive way we strike the keys on a keyboard, and it’s possible to reconstruct what someone was typing based on the vibration patterns alone. It’s an old technology we developed for catching terrorists and drug dealers.” #

• Churchill said that we shape our buildings, and afterward our buildings shape us. We made machines to help us think, and now the machines think for us.” #

• “When there is such a large gap of years between two friends, we Chinese call it wang nien chih chiao, a friendship that forgets the years. #

• “Grandpa would say, ‘pu ta pu hsiang shih.’ It means that sometimes you can’t become friends until you’ve fought each other.” #

• “The character for ‘mob’ is formed from the character for ‘nobility’ on one side and the character for ‘sheep’ on the other. So that’s what a mob is, a herd of sheep that turns into a pack of wolves because they believe themselves to be serving a noble cause. #

• Even after so many men died because of a few magic words, we continue to have faith in the power of words to do good. #

• Photography, videography, holography... the progression of such “reality-capturing” technology has been a proliferation of ways to lie about reality, to shape and distort it, to manipulate and fantasize. People shape and stage the experiences of their lives for the camera, go on vacations with one eye glued to the video camera. The desire to freeze reality is about avoiding reality. #

• By keeping and replaying this old simulacrum of my childhood, he was dreaming himself into reclaiming my respect and love, instead of facing the reality of what he had done and the real me. Perhaps it is the dream of every parent to keep their child in that brief period between helpless dependence and separate selfhood, when the parent is seen as perfect, faultless. It is a dream of control and mastery disguised as love, the dream that Lear had about Cordelia. #

• She notices that there’s a paler patch of skin around his ring finger. Even better. A married man is usually safer. A married man who doesn’t want her to know he’s married is the safest of all: he values what he has and doesn’t want to lose it. #

• It’s almost funny how people are so willing to give perfect strangers over the Internet information, would even compete with each other to do it, to show how knowledgeable they are. He’s pleased to make use of such petty vanities. #

• Viewing the site at approximately the time of day when the murder occurred can sometimes be helpful. #

• It has always been the regular state of things. There is no clarity, no relief. At the end of all rationality, there is simply the need to decide and the faith to live through, to endure. #

• You know what the Chinese think is the saddest feeling in the world? It’s for a child to finally grow the desire to take care of his parents, only to realize that they were long gone. #

• Every year, a fresh segment is added at the head to record the future; every year, an old segment is discarded from the tail, consigning the past to oblivion. Thus, while the Telosians do not forget, they also do not remember. They are said to never die, but it is arguable whether they ever live. #

• Time’s arrow is the loss of fidelity in compression. A sketch, not a photograph. A memory is a re-creation, precious because it is both more and less than the original. #

• But no matter what, never let the past pick your life for you.” #

• The word is still a mystery to you, but without the allure that it once held. Before we found how to live forever, sex and children were the closest we came to immortality. #

• “It is in the face of disasters that we show our strength as a people. Understand that we are not defined by our individual loneliness, but by the web of relationships in which we’re enmeshed. A person must rise above his selfish needs so that all of us can live in harmony. The individual is small and powerless, but bound tightly together, as a whole, the Japanese nation is invincible.” #

• “It’s hard to hear the music behind the words when their meanings get in the way,” #

• We are defined by the places we hold in the web of others’ lives. #

• “You only eat animals you like a little, but not too much.” #

• “Though we were not born on the same day of the same month of the same year, we ask that Fate give us the satisfaction of dying on the same second of the same minute of the same hour.” #

• It is hardly the happy and the powerful who go into exile. — Alexis de Tocqueville #

• The view of everything that has happened on Earth leaves here in an ever-expanding sphere of light. And you only have to control how far away you travel in space to determine how far back you’ll go in time. #

• But the past is consumed even as it is seen. The photons enter the lens, and from there they strike an imaging surface, be it your retina or a sheet of film or a digital sensor, and then they are gone, stopped dead in their paths. If you look but don’t pay attention and miss a moment, you cannot travel farther out to catch it again. That moment is erased from the universe, forever. #

• Evan was the only man I knew who was perfectly happy to defer to me when I told him that I could do something requiring mechanical skills better than he could. #

• The Westerners don’t want to understand China. Maybe they just can’t. #

• Our lives are ruled by these small, seemingly ordinary moments that turn out to have improbably large effects. Such randomness is much more common in human affairs than in nature, and there was no way that I, as a physicist, could have foreseen what happened next. #

• It’s easy to be civilized and display a patina of orderliness in calm times, but your true character only emerges in darkness and under great pressure: is it a diamond or merely a lump of the blackest coal? #