pantsfarm

I only noted a couple of them, but it was a really fascinating book to read. And it seems the quotes I’ve noted have little to do with the plants that were discussed, and though these are what I’ve selected to note, it’s not indicitave at all of the rest of the book.

“A human being may well ask an animal: ‘Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?’ The animal would like to answer, and say, ‘The reason is I always forget what I was going to say’ — but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent.”

This one about an animal is apparently actually the author quoting some essay Nietzsche wrote called “The Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” in 1876.

Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.

Memory is the enemy of wonder, which abides nowhere else but in the present. This is why, unless you are a child, wonder depends on forgetting — a process, that is, of subtraction.

I might update this when I finish the last chapter.