A man so often only finishes a house by turning it into a tomb.

G.K.Chesterton, The Scandal of Father Brown.

Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.

Bishop Joseph Butler

When you are happy, it's surprising how much you can drink.


From a friend from North Mitrovica -- soon to get married -- over coffee at DV.

There are times that we cannot seem to find our center. We have to find someplace to stand at the edges of ourselves. This seems the only place for us to exist and get through day-to-day. We cannot do this for so long but if we had a choice, we'd probably try to get closer in where it is more comfortable.

Travel was pointless. It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd.

Salman Rushdie, “The Shelter of the World,” The New Yorker of Feb. 25,2008

Human purpose may be a long-evolved consequence of the thermodynamic tendency to come to equilibrium....the process of life -- complexity building in the area of gradients, and energy flow -- is a natural phenomenon....life's natural purpose.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life

In most systems diversity begets stability.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life

When the energy available for the formation of complex systems is taken away, these systems revert to a more primitive level of function.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life

The sensing selves of the biosphere were brought into being, and are maintained, by thermodynamic potential and the molecular informational complexity necessary to tap it....Organisms may be seen as connectable nodes that transform the environment as they mediate energetic flows....Quickly growing systems -- ones that through evolution, technology, or both. tap into previously unrecognized or untapped gradients -- may spread like wildfire. But like raging flames, they rob themselves of their own resources.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life (pg. 158-59)

What we call life is neither a thing apart from matter, nor merely "living matter," but an informational and energetic process...

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life

Whenever a gradient is applied to a system, insofar as constraints allow, the gradient is spontaneously degraded as completely as possible. Constraints, of course, are not trivial. In life they entail extremely complex feedback loops as energy is channeled through chemical kinetics….Constraints regulate dynamic processes, but they don’t cause them.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life (pg. 123)

Far-from-equilibrium systems pay for their reduced entropy by exporting a concomitant increase in entropy into the surrounding environment….All organisms, not just human technological ones, produce waste.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life

The real purpose of a [cell] phone, as everyone knows, is texting. Only techno-tards make actual phone calls -- unless they need to lie.

Patricia Marx, The New Yorker of March 10, 2008.

…the very origins of life can be traced to the energy flows of an energetic universe…Deep in the chemical cycles of present-day bacteria are metabolic pathways, chemical traces repeating, with variation, the steps by which matter came to life…paints a picture of energy-rich matter maintaining and making more of itself before genes evolved….The bodies and selves we consider living derive from complex cycles of energy transformation, cycles that only later developed genes….Life displays directional processes such as expansion, increase of taxa, and increased energy use over time that do not square with … random process.

Eric D. Schneider & Dorion Sagan, Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life (pgs. xii-xiii)

I'm not reacting well, am I? Perhaps I should be grateful to still be sane.

Greg Bear, Eternity.

No one loves an armed missionary.

Robespierre, as quoted by Colin Jones in the NYRB of December 20, 2007.

Any life that ends in exile cannot have been totally mediocre.

Quoted by Simon Leys in the New York Review of December 20, 2008

Love is not a simple relation to someone else; it is always an attitude, a view of the world, a character trait.

Slobodan Selenic, Fathers and Forefathers

Some men relate what they think, as what they know.

Though defective in practice, he was religious in principle.

Samuel Johnson, on two separate occasions, to James Boswell in his The Life of Samuel Johnson