Ethan Goode

This is a digital commonplace book. Quotes from literature, history, film, TV, daily life. And a few from conversations I’ve had with the Machine. Read along.

“Take your time, think a lot Think of everything you’ve got For you will still be here tomorrow But your dreams may not” - Father And Son, Yusuf/Cat Stevens

“As media scholar Marshall McLuhan wrote, new technology constitutes a new human ‘environment.’ In McLuhan’s terms, an environment is not just a backdrop, but an active force—something that reshapes how we think, feel, and relate to others without our full awareness.” - D.W. Pasulka, The Others

“A reality is just what we tell each other it is. Sane and insane could easily switch places if the insane were to become the majority. You would find yourself locked in a padded cell, wondering what happened to the world.” - from In the Mouth of Madness (1994), dir. John Carpenter.

“‘I love history. Maybe it’s like your interest in taxidermy. God pronounces a critter dead and I say I can still make him play the banjo.’” - from Those Across the River, by Christopher Buehlman

“You wasted a life, why wouldn’t you waste the afterlife?” - Modest Mouse, Ocean Breathes Salty

“He met failure as one day he would probably meet death, with cynical resentment and the courage of a solitary.” - from The Spy Who Came In from the Cold, by John le Carré

“You shouldn’t let your eagerness to find an explanation interfere with your memory of events.” - from The Oxford Murders, by Guillermo Martínez

“There’s a difference between the truth and the part of the truth that can be proved.” - from The Oxford Murders, by Guillermo Martínez

“If AI represents intelligence emerging from within our own tools, UFOs represent intelligence erupting from beyond. Both challenge assumptions that humanity is the sole measure of mind, and together they demand new categories of discernment.” - D.W. Pasulka, The Others

Jacques Vallée “suggested that UFOs behave […] not as a singular craft from a distant planet, but as an information system, a network of signs and encounters that adapt and change […] cultural expectations” - D.W. Pasulka, The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny

“disruptive truth does not arrive on our terms. It arrives through strange, unwilling prophets and unsettles our categories of what counts as credible. It forces us to ask whether […] we would rather cling to our skepticism than confront truths that exceed our understanding.” - D.W. Pasulka

“To read alone is to step into an infinite space where none can follow.” - Katherine Rundell, Why You Should Read Children's Books, Even Though You Are So Old and Wise

“What holds more truth, history or prophecy?” - Dune: Prophecy (HBO 2024)

“Science fiction, which often predicts future technological developments with some accuracy, is sometimes referred to as a secular prophetic tradition.” - D.W. Pasulka, The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny

“State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes, the energy sources, the kinds of security, for which you would kill a child. Name, please, the children whom you would be willing to kill.” - from “Questionnaire,” by Wendell Berry

“maybe his purpose was to resist having a purpose, be the hedonist against which valorous sorts measure themselves, that’s its own kind of service, for without villains there can’t be heroes” - from Angel Down, by Daniel Krauss

“‘You’re looking for a purpose to save you!’ he shouted, to which the Bishop, rather mournfully, replied, “Aren’t you?’” - from Angel Down, by Daniel Krauss

“This is how it’s possible for the Town to maintain its perfection. All imperfections are forced upon the imperfect, so the ‘perfect’ can live content and oblivious. Is that the way it should be?” - from Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami

“I can’t even recall my former self. How can I be sure that self is worth returning to? Or that world?” - from Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami

“Only where there is disillusionment and depression and sorrow does happiness arise; without the despair of loss, there is no hope.” - from Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami

“The most useful response to grief over the unlived life is one small act on behalf of the life you still want.” - ChatGPT

Maybe “the universe itself is performing a computation, and it’s computing infinite numbers.” - Jana Levin, theoretical cosmologist From A Trip to Infinity, directed by Jonathan Halperin and Drew Takahashi (2022)

“I contented myself with whiskey, for medicinal purposes. It helped numb my various aches and pains. Not that the alcohol actually reduced the pain; it just gave the pain a life of its own, apart from mine.”

“my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusion to the ancient popular notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise.” - “The Black Cat,” by Edgar Allan Poe

“Revolution is almost bound to follow when a regime has lost not just the confidence of its people but confidence in itself.” - Antony Beevor, Rasputin: The Downfall of the Romanovs

“It’s been estimated that there are more stars in the universe than there are grains of sand on all the beaches in all the world. Just think about that for a moment.” —Jim Al-Khalili, Everything and Nothing: The Amazing Science of Empty Space (2011)

“Once again, life had a lesson to teach me: It takes years to build up, it takes moments to destroy.” - from Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami

“Buddhism is both a religion and a philosophy. Only your own understanding saves you from suffering.” Robert Thurman, Seven Wonders of the Buddhist World, directed by Faris Kermani (2011)

“Well, it breaks my heart to see you this way The beauty in life, where’s it gone? And somebody told me you were doing okay Somehow, I guess they were wrong” - Flogging Molly, “Whistles the Wind”

“They who had never wanted family are now lonely old men.” - from Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami

“As I drifted off, I thought, do you really expect me to know what’s going on?” - from Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami

“To tell the truth, I do not know this thing called ‘mind,’ what it does or how to use it. It is only a word I have heard.” - from Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami

“Let your body work until it is spent, but keep your mind for yourself.” - from Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami

“he wasn’t a nutcase, he wasn’t a sociopath, he wasn’t an outcast. McCandless was something else—although precisely what is hard to say. A pilgrim, perhaps.” - John Krakauer, Into the Wild

“It may, after all, be the habit of creative talents to invest themselves in pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable way of life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significant art or thought.” - Theodore Roszak, “In Search of the Miraculous”

“Procuring a good sofa, on the other hand, requires style and experience and philosophy.” - from Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, by Haruki Murakami

“That man was a philosopher, or perhaps a fool; I could not say which exactly, so I held my tongue. What he had said, had often been in my own thoughts.” - from The Horla, Guy de Maupassant

“Whence do these mysterious influences come, which change our happiness into discouragement, and our self-confidence into diffidence? One might almost say that the air is full of unknowable Forces, whose mysterious presence we have to endure.” - from The Horla, Guy de Maupassant

“Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.”

“A deadly germ—genetically modified to be human-to-human transmissible, hypervirulent, able to defeat countermeasures, and with no known cure could be twenty-first-century humans’ last invention.” - from: Biological War: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen

“a machine is more blameless, more sinless even than any animal. It has no intentions whatsoever but our own.” - from The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin

“The quality of the will to power is, precisely, growth. Achievement is its cancellation. To be, the will to power must increase with each fulfillment, making the fulfillment only a step to a further one. The vaster the power gained, the vaster the appetite for more.”

“The responsibility of sentience can be overwhelming.” - a friend and fellow Orlando attorney

“I haven't any destiny. All I have is dreams.” - from The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin

“he did not know what to do. He had never known what to do.” - from The Lathe of Heaven, by Ursula K. Le Guin

“I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking.” - from Into the Wild, by John Krakauer