Debbie Foster

Recovering memory is more like picking up shards of your past. But even that can be beautiful, because they can be reassembled as a mosaic, which, as the author Terry Tempest Williams says, is “a conversation between what is broken.”

How we imagine children to be turns out to reflect how we imagine the world ought to be, which is what makes the death of an innocent child (or, for some, that of an unborn fetus) so hard to bear: a possible world, a better world, seems to have died with it.

the human mind has fundamentally irrational elements. I’d go as far as to say that magical thinking forms the basis of selfhood. Our experience of ourselves and other people is essentially an act of imagination that can’t be sustained through wholly rational modes of thought. We see the light of consciousness in another’s eyes and, irresistibly,

Long before the modernists, Whitman integrated found text and ready-made language into a revolutionary formulation of artistic production that anticipates much of what is exciting about modern and postmodern art.

are the “two broad genres” that Maud Ellmann suggests

"You are long-lived!" exclaimed Durga.

"Our health is matched to the duration of our interests," said Agassiz. "Isn't that how it should be?"

we are creeping towards the slightly discomforting idea that what we call our mind or consciousness is constructed by an integrated set of brain structures that models selves and worlds, provides more or less clarity and insight, and can induce both lucid dreams and OBEs.

He felt like the face on the back of a coin being tossed in the air. It could go either way, but the whole thing had a bitter taste of destiny to it, as if the coin had already landed and everybody else knew the result.