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1 " I had an uncomfortable feeling I sometimes get in conversation with another person, as if the fundamental part of myself had evaporated-not in the sense of being gone, but as if it has undergone a phase transition and is hovering over my actual body as a vapor. That's the best I can describe it, as if my consciousness and my physical person are suddenly separated. "
― Nell Freudenberger , Lost and Wanted
2 " We now know that our universe is almost certainly 13.77 billion years old, and that it expanded more than a trillion trillion times in the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second of its life. "
3 " it was something harder to describe than that. We were on each other’s side in a way that felt permanent, and so it hurt more than it might have otherwise, when she decided to shut me out. "
4 " I’ve never worked on quantum entanglement, which Einstein once dismissed as “spooky action at a distance.” It’s a real phenomenon, though, one that has less to do with communication than with a shared history that causes a pair of particles, even once they’ve been permanently separated, to behave as if they knew what each other was thinking. "
5 " Charlie and I both felt very adult that last year of college, very experienced: I think we believed that what we'd achieved academically was akin to growing up, rather than something we might have done in place of it. "
6 " I read this article about how you can have anything going on in your head, as long as it doesn't manifest itself. Like a reflection.' I waited for my sister to expand on that, but she remained quiet. 'LIke a reflection that's different from what's doing the reflecting,' I suggested. "
7 " Physicists know that if you and I are sitting in a room together, you exert a gravitational force on me. It's almost nothing-I can't feel it-but it's the same force that binds our planet to our star. "
8 " I think that with most of our friends we choose how much of ourselves to reveal, and with a very select few it feels as if there is no choice. "
9 " One clue is that in pseudoscience, every piece fits neatly inside a theory and the scientist is never wrong. "
10 " I think we believed that what we'd achieved acamically was akin to growing up, rather than something we might have done in place of it. "
11 " They forget how much they used to love their own parents,” she said, “when they were kids. "