“Fantasizing about winning the lottery activates the same parts of our brains that would be activated if we actually won, notes Daniel Levine, professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Arlington, and an expert on decision theory and neural networks. Picturing ourselves in a limo activates visual areas of the brain, while imagining the clink of champagne glasses lights up the auditory cortex.”
“Spending two whole days there, we finally learned the dread and discomfort of living in a capsule hotel. It was wonderful, apart from the occasional shakeup and earthquake panic you’d feel when your neighbour decides to move his capsule four floors up, at 5 AM. He was courteous enough to leave a box of chocolate with an apology to his neighbouring capsules.”
“I thought I’d fix this problem by creating a city in which only a single home could be built. Then I’d see who moved in and keep track of their lives. Here’s what happened.”
“A loose thread is a metaphor. Some examples of ‘loose threads’:
Men with blue eyes. Men with green eyes. Bartenders with any-colored eyes. Bridge railings. Walks late at night. Perfectly cut lines of cocaine. Married men with blue or green eyes. A full bottle of pills, up or down. Credit cards. Airports, train platforms, bus stations, parking garages. The fourth glass of wine.”
“He practiced with baby carrots, swallowing them whole, easing them down his throat with yogurt. Later came the heroin pellets, each loaded with 14 grams of powder, machine-wrapped in wax paper and thick latex.”
“I searched for my own name and realized that I have died 265 times, first in 1952, most recently in 2013 (the most recent year for which data is available).”
“When the next full-margin rupture happens, that region will suffer the worst natural disaster in the history of North America. Roughly three thousand people died in San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Almost two thousand died in Hurricane Katrina. Almost three hundred died in Hurricane Sandy. FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami.”
“Meaning, the damage a venom does is species-specific. Snakebite is thus like lovesickness in that, each time, you’re wrecked special and anew.”
As Roth told Creem at the time, “we put the poster in because it upsets people. It’s disturbing. It’s one of those beautiful things where there’s actually nothing going on in the picture, and you’re forced to use your filthy little imagination.”
“Reception classes stay indoors when the air quality index (AQI) hits 180 – measured on an official scale of 500 by various sensors across the city. For primary kids the limit is 200, while the eldest students are allowed to brave the elements up to 250. Anything above 300 and school trips are called off. The World Health Organisation, meanwhile, recommends a safe exposure level of 25.”
“[…] looking for good software to count on has been a losing battle. Written by people with either no time or no money, most software gets shipped the moment it works well enough to let someone go home and see their family. What we get is mostly terrible.”
“A man trying to keep a 1,000-pound yoke steady on his back is all red-faced exertion up above, twinkle toes down below, like he’s trying to smuggle a stolen bridge past a snoring night watchman.”
“It’s the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done. Every now and then I’ll see an episode somewhere and I’m just intrigued by it. We actually did that and I was actually a part of it! I think it came at a time and it occupied a space that it might not have been possible to do before or since.”
“If I want to reach you, all I can do is make impressions on the surface of your umwelt, like a hand pressing against a window. We communicate with each other, but to some degree, we will always communicate like astronauts, tapping helmets together to pass sound waves through our spacesuits.”
Sometime in the 1990s, answered Knight, he passed a hiker while walking in the woods […] Other than that single syllable, he insisted, he had not spoken with or touched another human being, until this night, for twenty-seven years.