I’m very happy to be visiting my friend. Go away, John Nash, she’s the one with a beautiful mind.

Why do we keep Snell’s law on the books when we both know it to be false and have a more accurate refinement available? There are obvious pedagogic reasons. But are there serious scientific ones? I think there are, and these reasons have to do with the task of explaining. Specifying which factors are explanatorily relevant to which others is a job done by science over and above the job of laying out the laws of nature. Once the laws of nature are known, we still have to decide what kinds of factors can be cited in explanation.

–Nancy Cartwright, How the Laws of Physics Lie

Tell me again, Neil deGrasse Tyson, how philosophy is irrelevant and useless?

Strength in adversity and the need to make a living are not the same thing as freedom.

–Ellen Willis, No More Nice Girls: Countercultural Essays

It’s strange how realizing the truth of the artificiality of your preferred fiction in no way makes it easier to consume or enjoy fiction that is also just as highly stylized but is non-preferred.

All the fiction is a stage on a stage, and all the players merely types that echo our preferred way of seeing ourselves and our world.