Debbie Foster

resistance reveals preference and affinity, and fear and suspicion, political sympathy and personal antipathy, and the way these might come or go together. This is resistance as conflicted engagement

that idea—that information from the future “refluxes” to influence us in the present—is actually a very reasonable one, having increasing scientific support and plausibility.

The experience of self is as real as any other conscious experience, such as pain or pleasure. What is illusory, as emphasized by Buddhism, is the idea of a permanent and fixed essence that constitutes the "true self," the "real me."

'you could say stories are an especially useful storage format, a type of compression, and consciousness is the program that unpacks it.'

Recognizing how much lay beyond my knowledge was what made space for growth and surprise, and kept me usefully in place.

What if beauty was just our name for experiences that push us out of our mental ruts and burst open our reducing valves of consciousness?

I liked how the books and their world existed so wholly without me. I liked being able to be in it without having to hide from its gaze. I was not accustomed to sitting comfortably in rooms full of people, and there was something so new and pleasant about being a secret but welcome observer in the busy world of the book.

To live like this in books

… the historian Maya Jasanoff observes that "Erasing history' is a charge invariably lobbed at those who want to remove the statues of contentious figures. But taking down a statue isn't erasing history; it's revising cultural priorities … Burning documents: now that's erasing history."