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1 " Man is like a bride unto God. God is jealous when man veers away from Him. "
― Jaachynma N.E. Agu , The Prince and the Pauper
2 " Memory gallops, then checks up and veers unexpectedly; to memory, the order of occurrence is arbitary "
― Anthony Doerr , About Grace
3 " Well before she became famous — or infamous, depending on where you cast your vote — Loftus's findings on memory distortion were clearly commodifiable. In the 1970s and 1980s she provided assistance to defense attorneys eager to prove to juries that eyewitness accounts are not the same as camcorders. " I've helped a lot of people," she says. Some of those people: the Hillside Strangler, the Menendez brothers, Oliver North, Ted Bundy. " Ted Bundy?" I ask, when she tells this to me. Loftus laughs. " This was before we knew he was Bundy. He hadn't been accused of murder yet." " How can you be so confident the people you're representing are really innocent?" I ask. She doesn't directly answer. She says, " In court, I go by the evidence.... Outside of court, I'm human and entitled to my human feelings. " What, I wonder are her human feelings about the letter from a child-abuse survivor who wrote, " Let me tell you what false memory syndrome does to people like me, as if you care. It makes us into liars. False memory syndrome is so much more chic than child abuse.... But there are children who tonight while you sleep are being raped, and beaten. These children may never tell because 'no one will believe them.'" " Plenty of " Plenty of people will believe them," says Loftus. Pshaw! She has a raucous laugh and a voice with a bit of wheedle in it. She is strange, I think, a little loose inside. She veers between the professional and the personal with an alarming alacrity," she could easily have been talking about herself. "
4 " There was no room for dust devils in the laws of physics, as least in the rigid form in which they were usually taught. There is a kind of unspoken collusion going on in mainstream science education: you get your competent but bored, insecure and hence stodgy teacher talking to an audience divided between engineering students, who are going to be responsible for making bridges that won’t fall down or airplanes that won’t suddenly plunge vertically into the ground at six hundred miles an hour, and who by definition get sweaty palms and vindictive attitudes when their teacher suddenly veers off track and begins raving about wild and completely nonintuitive phenomena; and physics students, who derive much of their self-esteem from knowing that they are smarter and morally purer than the engineering students, and who by definition don’t want to hear about anything that makes no fucking sense. This collusion results in the professor saying: (something along the lines of) dust is heavier than air, therefore it falls until it hits the ground. That’s all there is to know about dust. The engineers love it because they like their issues dead and crucified like butterflies under glass. The physicists love it because they want to think they understand everything. No one asks difficult questions. And outside the windows, the dust devils continue to gambol across the campus. "
― Neal Stephenson , Cryptonomicon
5 " Popular applause veers with the wind. "
