{"author":"Michael Finkel","author_id":"Michael+Finkel","total_quotes":32,"quotes":[{"text":"There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain,' Knight said.","author":"Michael Finkel","tags":["solitude","woods"],"id":4953,"author_id":"Michael+Finkel"},{"text":"Maybe, I thought, Knight would talk about the marrow. He sat quietly, whether thinking or fuming or both, it was hard to tell. But he eventually arrived at a reply. It felt like some great mystic was about to revel the meaning of life.'Get enough sleep,' he said.He set his jaw in a way that conveyed he wouldn't be saying any more. This was what he had learned. I accepted it as truth.","author":"Michael Finkel","tags":["meaning-of-life","sleep","wisdom"],"id":45413,"author_id":"Michael+Finkel"},{"text":"In 1988, a cave explorer named Véronique Le Guen volunteered for an extreme experiment: to live alone in an underground cavern in southern France without a clock for one hundred and eleven days, monitored by scientists who wished to study the human body's natural rhythms in the absence of time cues. For a while, she settled into a pattern of thirty hours awake and twenty hours asleep. She described herself as being 'psychologically completely out of phase, where I no longer know what my values are or what is my purpose in life.'When she returned to society, her husband later noted, she seemed to have an emptiness inside her that she was unable to fully express. 'While I was alone in my cave I was my own judge,' she said. 'You are your own most severe judge. You must never lie or all is lost. The strongest sentiment I brought out of the cave is that in my life I will never tolerate lying.' A little more than a year later, Le Guen swallowed an overdose of barbiturates and lay down in her car in Paris, a suicide at age thirty-three.","author":"Michael Finkel","tags":["alone","asleep","awake","barbiturates","cave","cave-explorer","clock","emptiness","experiment","explorer","express","extreme","human-body","judge","lie","live","lying","monitored","overdose","pattern","phase","purpose","return","rhythms","science","scientists","settled","society","solitude","study","suicide","tolerate","underground","values","volunteered"],"id":83221,"author_id":"Michael+Finkel"},{"text":"Knight's disdain for Thoreau was bottomless - 'he had no deep insight into nature'...","author":"Michael Finkel","tags":["books","thoreau"],"id":105064,"author_id":"Michael+Finkel"},{"text":"Passion must be subject to reason; emotions lead one astray. 'There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain.","author":"Michael Finkel","tags":["complaining","emotions","passion"],"id":111626,"author_id":"Michael+Finkel"},{"text":"He pilfered a copy of Ulysses, but it was possibly the one book he did not finish. 'What's the point of it? I suspect it was a bit of a joke by Joyce. He just kept his mouth shut as people read into it more then there was. Pseudo-intellectuals love to drop the name Ulysses as their favorite book. I refused to be intellectually bullied into finishing it.","author":"Michael Finkel","tags":["books","joyce","ulysses"],"id":135100,"author_id":"Michael+Finkel"},{"text":"That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable.' Later he added, 'I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can't keep quiet.","author":"Michael Finkel","tags":["silence"],"id":136952,"author_id":"Michael+Finkel"},{"text":"Conversations between people can move like tennis games, swift and unpredictable. There are constant subtle visual and verbal cues, there's innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone. Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. It's part of being human.","author":"Michael Finkel","tags":["conversation","human","social-interactions"],"id":158673,"author_id":"Michael+Finkel"},{"text":"Still, the ten days were enough for me to see, as if peering over the edge of a well, that silence could be mystical, and that if you dared, diving fully into your inner depths might be both profound and disturbing.","author":"Michael Finkel","tags":["inner-self","silence"],"id":174102,"author_id":"Michael+Finkel"},{"text":"Silence, it appears, is not the opposite of sound. It is another world altogether, literally offering a deeper level of thought, a journey to the bedrock of the self.","author":"Michael Finkel","tags":["deep-thought","self","silence","sound"],"id":181810,"author_id":"Michael+Finkel"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":32,"pages":4,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}