Tag: quotation

What is significant about unofficial, extra-canonical fan fiction is that it often spins the kind of stories that showrunners wouldn’t think to tell, because fanficcers often come from a different demographic. The discomfort seems to be not that the shows are being reinterpreted by fans, but that they are being reinterpreted by the wrong sorts of fans – women, people of colour, queer kids, horny teenagers, people who are not professional writers, people who actually care about continuity (sorry). The proper way for cultural mythmaking to progress, it is implied, is for privileged men to recreate the works of privileged men from previous generations whilst everyone else listens quietly. That’s how it’s always been done. That’s how it should be done in the future, whatever Tumblr  says.

Laurie Penny, The Adventure of the Overzealous Fanbase

I wonder if things can happen too early or too late or if everything happens at exactly the right time. If so, how sad and beautiful.

Simon van Booy, from “The Still But Falling World,” The Secret Lives of People in Love: Stories  (via orchidetelm)

Some things in life only happen once, the memories of them lasting forever. They’re moments that alter you, turning you into a person you never thought you’d become, but someone you were always destined to be.

J.M. Darhower, Sempre (via simply-quotes)

The popular history of science is full of such falsehoods. In the case of evolution, Darwin was a much better geologist than ornithologist, at least in his early years. And while he did notice differences among the birds (and tortoises) on the different islands, he didn’t think them important enough to make a careful analysis. His ideas on evolution did not come from the mythical Galápagos epiphany, but evolved through many years of hard work, long after he had returned from the voyage. (To get an idea of the effort involved in developing his theory, consider this: One byproduct of his research was a 684-page monograph on barnacles.)

The myth of the finches obscures the qualities that were really responsible for Darwin’s success: the grit to formulate his theory and gather evidence for it; the creativity to seek signs of evolution in existing animals, rather than, as others did, in the fossil record; and the open-mindedness to drop his belief in creationism when the evidence against it piled up.

The mythical stories we tell about our heroes are always more romantic and often more palatable than the truth. But in science, at least, they are destructive, in that they promote false conceptions of the evolution of scientific thought.

Leonard Mlodinow, It is, in Fact, Rocket Science

If I got more happy secrets I would share them, but true secrets are more often not the positive sentiments we post about ourselves on Facebook or see reflected in Hallmark cards, they are the complicated feelings we struggle with in the dark because they make us feel alone.

Frank Warren, Postsecret May 16, 2015

We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic to creativity. When we get home, home is still the same, but something in our minds has changed, and that changes everything.

Jonah Leher, The Observer
(via psych2go)