Catherine Cady Coleman

 

You owe us, Dad.  We're not useless.  We never were.  Now you're looking after the kids... and you're gonna tell them they're not useless.

When I lived in Porpoise Spit, I used to sit in my room for hours and listen to ABBA songs. But since I've met you and moved to Sydney, I haven't listened to one Abba song. That's because my life is as good as an Abba song. It's as good as Dancing Queen. 

Relatively soon, I will die. Maybe in 20 years, maybe tomorrow, it doesn't matter. Once I am dead and everyone who knew me dies too, it will be as though I never existed. What difference has my life made to anyone. None that I can think of. None at all. 

Helen, what did you really think of me deep in your heart? Was I really the man you wanted to be with? Was I? Or were you disappointed but too nice to show it? 

The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.

- Steven Weinberg

Self

Suppose you turn your attention inward in search of this 'I'. You may encounter nothing more than an ever changing stream of consciousness, a flow of thoughts and feelings in which there is no real self to be discovered.

- Jim Holt

1,000 feet

One more quote from Caitlin...

A library in the middle of a community is a cross between an emergency exit, a life-raft and a festival. They are cathedrals of the mind; hospitals of the soul; theme parks of the imagination. On a cold rainy island, they are the only sheltered public spaces where you are not a consumer, but a citizen instead.

I cannot understand anti-abortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species we've fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don't believe in the sanctity of life. The shrugging acceptance of war, famine, epidemic, pain and life-long poverty shows us that, whatever we tell ourselves, we've made only the most feeble of efforts to really treat human life as sacred.

Overeating

...  it's come to be regarded as the lowest-ranking of all the addictions.  It's a way of fucking yourself up while still remaining fully functional, because you have to.  Fat people aren't indulging in the "luxury" of their addiction making them useless, chaotic, or a burden.  Instead, they are slowly self-destructing in a way that doesn't inconvenience anyone.  And that's why it's so often a woman's addiction of choice. All the quietly eating mums.  All the KitKats in office drawers.  All the unhappy moments, late at night, caught only in the fridge light.

Messier 104

Sombrero Galaxy (M104)

(NASA, 2006, http://nix.ksc.nasa.gov)

Why do my eyes hurt?

- You've never used them before.