"There’s no narrative to your life, no arc, no reward for achieving all the things you want. That kind of thinking is a recipe for a you-centric world view and is a very lonely road. Focus instead on the role you play in the stories of others."
- Justin McElroy, What it has taken me 33 years to learn / collected September 4, 2025
"I ran out of milk and decided to walk to my local gas station instead of driving to the store. On the way there i noticed so many things that simply fly by in a blur if I was to drive a car. I saw the flowers and the trees and every blade of grass in great detail, the ants and the bees working away. Then I arrived at the gas station and they didn't even have milk, and I was happy."
- damson1115 on a random Youtube comment / collected September 4, 2025
"and the universe said I love you because you are love"
- Julian Gough, Minecraft End Poem / collected September 4, 2025
"Sometimes the player read lines of code on a screen. Decoded them into words; decoded words into meaning; decoded meaning into feelings, emotions, theories, ideas, and the player started to breathe faster and deeper and realised it was alive, it was alive, those thousand deaths had not been real, the player was alive. You. You. You are alive."
- Julian Gough, Minecraft End Poem / collected September 4, 2025
"Does it know that we love it? That the universe is kind?"
- Julian Gough, Minecraft End Poem / collected September 4, 2025
"...the whole point of life is to not know for certain. If we were ever granted some sort of knowledge of a supposedly objective meaning of life, wouldn't that take away the value from living? We all live different lives for different reasons and I think that was intentional in the universe's design: for us to never know such things... So we can create our own... Because to tell us how to live is to prevent us from living."
- Luvstar, Interpretation of life, the universe, and everything / collected September 4, 2025
"Why do these things happen to us? Is it fair? What is the purpose of it all? But I realized there is no point in asking why it must happen, because some things are better left unsaid, unheard, and unknown... We would not be able to create our own narratives because it would seem like every story has already been said."
- Luvstar, on the topic of suffering / collected September 4, 2025
"And when the universe has finished exploding, all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all begin to fall toward the center of the universe again. And then there will be nothing to stop us from seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be moving towards us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon because when we look into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling."
- Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time / collected September 2, 2025
"They can kill you, but the legalities of eating you are quite a bit dicier."
- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest / collected September 2, 2025
"Have the audacity. Do it anyway."
- owiebrainhurts on youtube / collected September 2, 2025
"A horse walks into a bar. The bartender asks 'Can I get you anything?' The horse replies 'I think not,' and promptly disappears. If you don't get it, it's important to first understand that the French philosopher Descartes famously said, 'I think, therefore I am.' So when the horse said 'I think not,' then he could no longer be. I guess I could have explained all of that before I told the joke, but that would be putting Descartes before the horse."
- kdbvols on reddit / collected September 2, 2025