Literary Birthday – 23 November – Jennifer Michael Hecht

Happy Birthday, Jennifer Michael Hecht, born 23 November 1965.

Five Quotes

1. How was life before Pop-Tarts, Prozac, and padded playgrounds? They ate strudel, took opium, and played on the grass.
2. We seem obsessed with motivation, rallying ourselves to something beyond the life available to us right now, and we treat this motivation as if it were a major part of the history of wisdom, which it is not.
3. The spider and her patterned web hypnotise me because we are the same: patterns and instinct and cunning, our exalted science and art always also involved in death. Webs, molecules, networks. Isn’t my wonder at the spider, in fact, the universe marvelling at itself?
4. Prayer is based on the remote possibility that someone is actually listening; but so is a lot of conversation.
5. None of us can truly know what we mean to other people, and none of us can know what our future self will experience.

Jennifer Michael Hecht is an American teacher, author, poet, historian, and philosopher. She is the author of Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation and The Happiness Myth: Why What We Think Is Right Is Wrong.

Source for Image

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QEDCon_Day_One-103_(17127829697).jpg

zooterkin, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

by Amanda Patterson