Constructs Quotes

“There is a strange emptiness to life without myths.

I am African American — by which I mean, a descendant of slaves, rather than a descendant of immigrants who came here willingly and with lives more or less intact. My ancestors were the unwilling, unintact ones: children torn from parents, parents torn from elders, people torn from roots, stories torn from language. Past a certain point, my family’s history just… stops. As if there was nothing there.

I could do what others have done, and attempt to reconstruct this lost past. I could research genealogy and genetics, search for the traces of myself in moldering old sale documents and scanned images on microfiche. I could also do what members of other cultures lacking myths have done: steal. A little BS about Atlantis here, some appropriation of other cultures’ intellectual property there, and bam! Instant historically-justified superiority. Worked great for the Nazis, new and old. Even today, white people in my neck of the woods call themselves “Caucasian”, most of them little realizing that the term and its history are as constructed as anything sold in the fantasy section of a bookstore.

These are proven strategies, but I have no interest in them. They’ll tell me where I came from, but not what I really want to know: where I’m going. To figure that out, I make shit up.”
― N.K. Jemisin

“I have always thought that people are, by nature, nomadic, but they’ve built up anti-human constructs to keep them in place and then they pop pills to mask their misery and look for ways to distract from their emptiness.”
― Jackie Haze, Borderless

“No escape from patterns and systems, no exits. Nothing, and no one, resides outside a system; that’s the way it is. Nothing outside the inside, the inside is also outside, etc.”
― Lynne Tillman, Men and Apparitions

“What does freedom mean if we accept the fundamental premise that humans are social beings, raised in certain social and historical contexts and belonging to particular communities that shape their desires and understandings of the world?”
― Lila Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving?

“When being objective, we can transcend and look back at our constructs with powerful clarity; instead of looking through them, which can give a murky and distorted view.”
― Jay Woodman

“When you engage with people, you build your own insight into what’s being discussed. Someone else’s understanding complements yours, and together you start to weave an informed interpretation. You tinker until you can move on.”
― Marcia Conner, The New Social Learning: A Guide to Transforming Organizations Through Social Media

“Intricate infrastructures aren't infinite.”
― Justin K. McFarlane Beau

“Many things as we have constructed them can be redefined and are neither correct nor incorrect. I love making love to a woman. I love her every quiver, her every movement, her every moan, her every breath. I love the journey my hands make over her every soft curve, the smell of her skin, and I revel in the feminine beauty, unmatched by anything else on this earth. But the core connection is what matters most and, while I don’t know what draws me to the essence of women rather than men or both, I wanted to be swallowed up by exactly that – the mystery of why we don’t want to be without each other.”
― Jackie Haze, Borderless

“Moreover, we were to each other aspects of a dream unrealized. I emblemized the excitement of freedom, a life untethered by the confines of constructs. She illustrated a sense of belonging, of ongoing laughter in the face of those constructs, a true lifeline within the walking dead. We were standing in different places, yet the same, seeing within each other a sense of truth within the lies, a radiant light that illuminated the dark.”
― Jackie Haze, Borderless

“Sometimes life abruptly opens up in ways so vast that it engulfs all of our constructs and theories and beliefs in the swiftness of that single moment. At times such as these, life does nothing less than demand a brutally exacting reconstruction of everything that we’ve expended the raw essence of our lives constructing.”
― Craig D. Lounsbrough, The Eighth Page: A Christmas Journey

“In Uganda, I wrote a questionaire that I had my research assistants give; on it, I asked about the embalasassa, a speckled lizard said to be poisonous and to have been sent by Prime minsister Milton Obote to kill Baganda in the late 1960s. It is not poisonous and was no more common in the 1960s than it had been in previous decades, as Makerere University science professors announced on the radio and stated in print… I wrote the question, What is the difference between basimamoto and embalasassa? Anyone who knows anything about the Bantu language—myself included—would know the answer was contained in the question: humans and reptiles are different living things and belong to different noun classes… A few of my informants corrected my ignorance… but many, many more ignored the translation in my question and moved beyond it to address the history of the constructs of firemen and poisonous lizards without the slightest hesitation. They disregarded language to engage in a discussion of events… My point is not about the truth of the embalasassa story… but rather that the labeling of one thing as ‘true’ and the other as ‘fictive’ or ‘metaphorical’—all the usual polite academic terms for false—may eclipse all the intricate ways in which people use social truths to talk about the past. Moreover, chronological contradictions may foreground the fuzziness of certain ideas and policies, and that fuzziness may be more accurate than any exact historical reconstruction… Whether the story of the poisionous embalasassa was real was hardly the issue; there was a real, harmless lizard and there was a real time when people in and around Kampala feared the embalasassa. They feared it in part because of beliefs about lizards, but mainly what frightened people was their fear of their government and the lengths to which it would go to harm them. The confusions and the misunderstandings show what is important; knowledge about the actual lizard would not.”
― Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Studies on the History of Society and Culture)

“News is anyway a construct, as different from truth. And then further news on the same subject uses the construct as the truth and soon the news anyway is far removed from the truth. As this is happening, the constructs based on lies are moving towards the truth. So the incremental change in lies, is towards truth, and the delta change in truth, is towards lies. So if someone is looking at the current direction of truth and lie constructs they seems to reflect the opposite.

Narratives get fed to us, riding on jokes and tidbits constructed at opposite ends and so on till the truths become lies, and lies, the truth.
- Vineet

REALITY IS ABOUT TRUTH ADDED TO LIES

हक़ीक़त सच और झूठ का समावेश है”
― Vineet Raj Kapoor

“Matter and force were enough. There was as yet no thought of an unrepresented base; for if the particles kept growing smaller there would always be bigger and better glasses to see them through. The collapse of the mechanical model was not yet in sight, nor had any of those other factors which have since contributed to the passing of the dead-centre of literalness - idealist philosophies, genetic psychology, psycho-analysis - as yet begun to take effect. Consequently there was as yet no dawning apprehension that the phenomena of the familiar world may be representations in the final sense of being the mental construct of the observer.”
― Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry

“The struggle to reach reality—that’s the main objective of this creature who tries, in every way, to cling to whatever exists by means of a total vision of things. I meant to make clear too the way vision—the way of seeing, the viewpoint—alters reality, constructing it. A house is not only constructed with stones, cement etc. A man’s way of looking constructs it too.”
― Clarice Lispector, The Besieged City