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It marked my loss, at the age of fifty-four, of all that peace and balance which the normal mind possesses through its accustomed conception of external nature and nature's laws. Thenceforward the ten of us - but the student Danforth and myself above all others - were to face a hideously amplified world of lurking horrors which nothing can erase from our emotions, and which we would refrain from sharing with mankind in general if we could.

— At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft

No free member of a Northwest Coast household would ever be seen chopping or carrying wood. To do so was to undermine one's own status, effectively making oneself the equivalent of a slave. Californian chiefs, by contrast, seem to have elevated these exact same activities into a solemn public duty, incorporating them into the core rituals of the sweat lodge.

— The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber, David Wengrow (Page 8)

For what does "the view from nowhere" connote but the perspective of the refugee, migrant, itinerant, and nomad. An individual without a consistent or fixed placeness, without the kind of fixed ties to the land, culture, and history that Heidegger lauded, could well be said to represent the "view from nowhere." Indeed the eternal fascist disparagement of "globalists" and "cosmopolitans" has always explicitly been grounded in fear of the dangerously infectious universalities gravitated to by those without a home, those untethered and mobile. To be stateless is to be untrustworthy, and to choose to be stateless is to be a traitor. Opposition to universalism always comes tied at the hip to opposition to movement.

— Did the Science Wars Take Place? by William Gillis

Though the limestone formation was, on the evidence of such typical imbedded fossils as ventriculites, positively and unmistakably Comanchian and not a particle earlier, the free fragments in the hollow space included a surprising proportion from organisms hitherto considered as peculiar to far older periods…

— At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft

but important above all else was the vast deposit of shells and bones, which in places nearly choked the passage. Washed down from unknown jungles of Mesozoic tree ferns and fungi, and forests of Tertiary cycads, fan palms, and primitive angiosperms, this osseous medley contained representatives of more Cretaceous, Eocene, and other animal species than the greatest paleontologist could have counted or classified in a year. Mollusks, crustacean armor, fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and early mammals - great and small, known and unknown.

— At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft

Danforth was a great reader of bizarre material, and had talked a good deal of Poe. I was interested myself because of the antarctic scene of Poe's only long story - the disturbing and enigmatical Arthur Gordon Pym.

— At the Mountains of Madness by H.P. Lovecraft, H. P. Lovecraft

Such notions of freedom as avoidance of external influence are incoherent and impossible, since no one is a cartesian island, able to disconnect from the world and return to some primordial "a priori" authentic self.

— Did the Science Wars Take Place? by William Gillis

That is to say, many people have implicitly taken freedom as a matter of being at least partially un-caused, a patch of reality somehow severing its inputs from everything else.

— Did the Science Wars Take Place? by William Gillis

Folks can always contrive to create a situation, both social and material, in which it benefits you to believe not what is true but whatever they want. Once this crack is opened it can spiral into a feedbacking dynamic until your entire mind is arbitrarily controlled.

— Did the Science Wars Take Place? by William Gillis

The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons. In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways. It will never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victim. But it will, in these cases, husband and protract its murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it by the gradual approaches of an artful courtship. In these cases it seems to yearn for something like sympathy and consent.

— Carmilla by Carmen Maria Machado, Joseph Sheridan Lefanu

What makes modern science SO compelling is precisely the scope of its successful reductionism; its capacity at vast lossless compression of data.

— Did the Science Wars Take Place? by William Gillis