Debbie Foster

What appears to the experiencer, after all, is a part of culture. Indeed, one of my deepest intuitions that I will play out in these pages is that the paranormal is culture working in heretofore unimagined ways—expressing itself, yes, but also overcoming,

Sharif will be frightened by how little he knows the people he knows best. Despite knowing how they'd behave and what they'd say in most situations, there will hardly be any sense of their inward experience. He won't feel seen in this way by them either. The walls of himself will isolate him almost entirely. And even within his own borders, it will

Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about.

The intuition that otherness signals supernatural contact is common.

why should we believe that there is any way we ought to feel, that reality dictates our total reaction to life

I couldn't say it was paradise but, more, a different kind of reality; and what gave it its fascination was that the traditional owners had never lost contact with their gods. Faithfully, they kept linking heaven and earth with their songs, while the rest of us remained stranded in perplexity, able to feel the power of the rocks, but not to read

Rather than knowing you, then, the algorithm moreso guides you into who you will become.

I worried about not having strong opinions. The truth was, I did not care much for opinions. I wanted instead to be in the silent activity of a good book, to observe and feel.

After years of feeling that way, it was strange to wake up and read a poem every day, and to feel I had grown intimate with it, tender with its idiosyncrasies of form and rhythm. For four or five weeks this went on, the poem becoming as falsely natural as a piercing, a foreign body fitted snugly into the internal and external material of my life.