• “No ones sees the barn… Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn” [p 12]
  • “We only see what the others see” [p 12]
  • “We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception … This literally colors our vision … like all tourism” [p 12]
  • “The question of dying becomes a wise reminder. It cures us of our innocence of the future” [p 15]
    • I find it interesting that the word “cures” is used here. “cured of our innocence”
  • I got some vibes similar to Finite and Infinite Games regarding playing roles
  • “your truth” [p 23]
    • Don’t worry so much about what others are experience or believe
    • “What we call rain he calls soap. What we call apples he calls rain” [p 23]
  • “Tibetans believe there is a transitional state between death and re-birth. Death is a waiting period, basically. Soon a fresh womb will receive the soul.” [p 37]
  • “This place recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it’s a gateway or pathway.” [p 37]
  • “Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is an end of attachment to things.” [p 38]
  • “Who knows what anyone wants to do? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulses in the brain?” [p 45]
    • #wants-and-desires
  • “learn to look as children again” [p 50]
  • “Why did you name Heinrich Heinrich? … I thought it had authority… I wanted to shield him, make him unafraid” [p 63]
  • “Why is it, Alfonse, that decent, well-meaning and responsible people find themselves intrigued by catastrophe when they see it on television?… Because we’re suffering from brain fade. We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.” [p 65]
  • “To become a crowd it to keep out death” [p 73]
  • “The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation” [p 81]
  • “The family process works toward sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate.” [p 82]
  • “family solidarity” [p 82]
  • “Our fear is pure… a form of transcendental meditation” [p 90]
  • “We are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.” [p 99]
  • “Whatever relaxes you is dangerous” [p 101]
  • “I’m not just a college professor. I’m the head of a department. I don’t see myself fleeing an airborne toxic event. That’s for people who live in mobile homes out in the scrubby parts of the country…” [p 115]
  • “…trying to work out from their faces how frightened we should be.” [p 117]
  • “… was she so open to suggestion that she would develop every symptom as it was announced?” [p 122]
  • “power of suggestion” [p 123]
  • “is a symptom a sign or a thing?” [p 123]
  • “awed by the thing that threatens your life, to see it as a cosmic force, so much larger than yourself…” [p 124]
  • “No one thing was either more or less plausible than any other thing… we were release from the need to distinguish.” [p 125]
  • “a common identity” [p 126]
  • “The thick orange vests did not seem especially out of place even though we were on more or less dry land, well above sea level, many miles from the nearest ominous body of water.” [p 133]
    • This made me laugh.
  • SIMUVAC [p 134]
    • Short for simulated evacuation
    • “But this evacuation isn’t simulated. It’s real.” [p 134]
    • “Are you saying that you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?” [p 134]
  • “Am I going to die? We’ll know more in fifteen years… So, to outlive this substance, I will have to make it into my eighties.” [p 136]
  • “You are said to be dying and yet are separate from the dying…” [p 137]
  • “A stranger in your own dying” [p 137]
  • “It is now official, according to the computer. I’ve got death inside me.” [p 144]
    • “This is the nature of modern death” [p 144]
    • “The more we learn, the more it grows” [p 145]
    • “We’re seeing into the future but haven’t learned how to process the experience.” [p 145]
  • "… its escorting aircraft, the cloud resembled a national promotion for death, a multimillion-dollar campaign backed by radio spots, heavy print and billboard, TV saturation." [p 151]
  • “The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear” [p 154]
  • “The sooner we forget these spills, the sooner we can come to grips with the real issue… the kind of radiation that surrounds us every day.” [p 166]
  • “… sitting in a cage full of poisonous snakes, for the Guinness Book of World Records” [p 174]
  • “Most of us spend our lives avoiding danger” [p 174]
  • “What’s the condition? … I’m afraid to die… I think about it all the time. It won’t go away.” [p 186]
  • “We are the sum total of our data… just as we are the sum total of our chemical impulses” [p 192]
  • “We ought to have an official Day of the Dead. Like the Mexicans. We do. It’s called Super Bowl Week.” [p 206]
    • Everyone is “brain dead”
    • Super Bowl Week
  • “suicide wish of technology” [p 207]
  • “I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit” [p 217]
  • “The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surroundings, alone, distinct, whole. [p 218]
  • “What do I do to make death less strange?… Do I risk death…” [p 218]
  • “Here are the two things I want most in the world. Jack not to die first. And Wilder to stay the way he is forever.” [p 225]
    • Wilder is a child. I think there is a theme of life being childlike life. Not just being “alive”.
  • “…we’d been forced to recognize the existence of a second kind of death. One was real, the other was synthetic.” [p 229]
    • brain dead versus “Death in the flesh” [p 232]
  • “If only one could see death as just another surface one inhabits for a time.” [p 232]
  • “fundamental principles” [p 234]
  • “You get old, you find out you’re ready for something but you don’t know what it is . You’re always getting prepared.” [p 237]
  • “Routine things can be deadly” [p 237]
  • “The power of suggestion could be more important than side effects.” [p 239]
  • “… it is possible to be homesick for a place even when you are there.” [p 245]
  • elevated potassium levels [p 248]
  • “The less you know, the better.” [p 249]
  • “The house was a sepia maze off old and tired things. There was an immensity of things, an overburdening weight, a connection, a mortality.” [p 250]
  • “Breathe, don’t think.” [p 254]
  • TV teaches us fear [p 255]
  • “The cycle of history has but four ages. We happen to be in the last of these.” [p 260]
  • “I could easily imagine a perfectly healthy person being made ill just taking these tests.” [p 263]
  • “Have you recently been feeling tired? What do people usually say?” [p 264]
    • Following others, not thinking for ourselves
  • “They get interested in their own condition. It becomes almost like a hobby.” [p 265]
  • “It’s almost as though our fear is what brings it on. If we could learn not to be afraid, we could live forever.” [p 270]
  • “…I’m just going through the motions of living. I’m technically dead.” [p 270]
  • “Has my life been a mad dash for pleasure?” [p 270]
  • “Do you think it’s a sense of incompleteness that causes you the deepest regret?” [p 270]
  • “The deepest regret is death. The only thing to face is death.” [p 270]
  • ”… you can’t let down the living by slipping into self-pity and despair. People will depend on you to be brave." [p 271]
    • As I’ve struggled this year in my life personally, I’ve really thought about how dependent we are on each other for uplifting each other and making life worth living.
  • “What good is a preciousness based on fear and anxiety?” [p 272]
  • “A person has to be told he is going to die before he can begin to live life to the fullest.” [p 272]
  • “… you can always get around death by concentrating on the life beyond.” [p 272]
  • “… a second birth, a second life…” [p 273]
  • “… life beyond death.” [p 273]
  • “… freedom from limits.” [p 276]
    • “He doesn’t know he’s going to die.” [p 276]
  • “… there are two kinds of people in the world. Killers and diers. Most of us are diers.” [p 277]
  • “I thought repression was outdated. They’ve been telling us for years not to repress our fears and desires.” [p 282]
  • “Followed by a greater death… Are you saying death adapts? It eludes our attempts to reason with it?” [p 294]
  • “… advance in consciousness… I knew for the first time what rain really was. I knew what wet was…. A richness, a density.” [p 296]
  • “higher plane of energy.” “super perception” [p 298]
  • “What does the Church say about heaven today? Saved? What is saved?… Show me an angel…. You would have a head so dumb to believe this? It’s not what I believe that counts. It’s what you believe… The nonbelievers need the believers.” [p 303]
    • “It is for the others. Not for us.” [p 303]
  • “If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse.” [p 303]
    • Sacrificing for the greater good.
  • “… appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief.” [p 304]
  • “Hell is when no one believes.” [p 304]
  • “There is no truth without fools.” [p 304]
  • “… decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly. This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living.” [p 310]
    • advancement is death.
    • “The cults of the famous and the dead.” [p 310]