Debbie Foster

For Grush, the specious present not only lets the brain get a jump on events, but also gives it time to sync up nerve signals arriving on different schedules from all parts of the body.

"Most unhappiness is caused because people listen to themselves... instead of talking to themselves."

Every assumption about the purpose of fiction so far—opiate for the democratic masses, healthy snack, empathy dumbbells, propaganda viruses that can infect for good or evil--has rested on the same assumption: fiction must do something; it must demonstrate value.

POETS LOVE WALTER BENJAMIN. He often wrote criticism and philosophy as if they were poetry, gathering strange assemblances, making associative leaps, and turning his attention to objects others may have viewed as of little significance.

White space in fiction or narrative nonfiction can act like cuts in film: a way to shift from location A to location B, or from scene to scene.

This is intoxicating speculation. If we excavate our dreams, to the lowest level, we will find the remains of our ancestors. Freud's evolutionary psychology comes perilously close to mysticism: 'Every dream has at least one point where it eludes explanation - a sort of umbilicus linking it to the unknown.'

When it comes to learning, Triumph is the real foe; it’s Disaster that’s your teacher. It’s Disaster that brings objectivity. It’s Disaster that’s the antidote to that greatest of delusions, overconfidence. And ultimately, both Triumph and Disaster are impostors. They are results that are subject to chance. One of them just happens to be a better

I understand these books as commonly defined by an experimentation with different forms of autobiographical acts for the purpose of gaining self-insight and promoting self-development. They explore various mark-making techniques that might make the inner world better known, visible for observation, and ripe for analysis.

All quality is a structure, not a function, a process, or a computation. One implication is that consciousness is nonalgorithmic; it is not (Turing) computable.