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Quote by Rebecca Yarros

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Fourth Wing

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Rebecca Yarros

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“We don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound. Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It's not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn't change is a product of literate cultures' reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do. Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.”

WritingPastHistoryInterpretationSpeakingWritten WordExhalationOral Tradition
Book:The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling
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“Dark matter and dark energy make up 96 percent of the universe. And: The sun doesn’t rise, the Earth just spins. And: When we breathe, we are breathing in the very same molecules our dead ancestors did. And: One day the sun will obliterate the Earth and all life here will be gone forever. And: Everything you know and will ever know is housed in three pounds of tissue, isolated from the world. And: Color doesn’t even really exist, it’s just how you perceive wavelengths of light; color is all in your head. Or: There are more atoms in my eye than there are stars in the known universe.”

End Of The WorldAncestorsDark MatterThe BrainThe EarthScary Facts
Book:In Limbo
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“Used with care, substances that harm neural tissue, such as alcohol, can aid intelligence: you corrode the chromium, giggly, crossword puzzle-solving parts of your mind with pain and poison, forcing the neurons to take responsibility for themselves and those around them, toughening themselves against the accelerated wear of these artificial solvents. After a night of poison. your brain wakes up in the morning saying, “No, I don't give a shit who introduced the sweet potato into North America.”

AlcoholTriviaThe Brain
Book:The Mezzanine
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“For those who have trouble with a telephone number or with a name to fit a face, it is even problematical contemplating the gap between us and them, the normal and the genius. Someone once asked A. C. Aitken, professor at Edinburgh University, to make 4 divided by 47 into a decimal. After four seconds he started and gave another digit every three-quarters of a second: ‘point 08510638297872340425531914’. He stopped (after twenty-four seconds), discussed the problem for one minute, and then restarted: ‘191489’– five-second pause –‘361702127659574468 . Now that’s the repeating point. It starts again with 085. So if that’s forty-six places, I’m right.”

The Brain
Book:The Faber Book of Science
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