A Quote by Diane Ackerman

Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul. — © Diane Ackerman
Our sense of safety depends on predictability, so anything living outside the usual rules we suspect to be an outlaw, a ghoul.
Throughout my life, I have been fascinated by predictability and frustrated by our inability to predict. I don't believe it makes sense for our generation to believe or pretend that we can solve the problems of the future because do not understand what these problems will be. Just do this thought experiment: Imagine you're in month of May 1914, and try to work out a plan of action for the next 100 years! Hardly anything will make sense.
I wasn't trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn't have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.
We try to create a situation where we're the casino. It's like how an actuary would set insurance rates. Predictability, predictability, predictability. What's the path to least risk? What's the greater chance of getting some return on this asset?
There are rules and laws to help ensure our physical safety. Likewise, the Lord has provided guidelines and commandments to help ensure our spiritual safety so that we might successfully navigate this often-treachero us mortal existence and return eventually to our Heavenly Father.
FDA, which regulates the safety of vegetables, doesn't have those kinds of rules because Congress doesn't want it to. It's not that the vegetables themselves have anything wrong with them; it's that they're contaminated with animal manure. One of the rationales for a single food safety agency is that you can't separate animals from vegetables.
How much freedom I have depends on the number and nature of my options. And that, in turn, depends both on the rules of the game and on the assetts of the players: it is a very important and widely neglected truth that it does not depend on the rules of the game alone.
That's what stress management is about, that's what psychotherapy is about, finding religion, or finding your loved one or your hobby - any of those, they give you more outlets, more of a sense of control, more of a sense of predictability, of social support. They give you the means to psychologically finesse ambiguous outside reality.
La Zona is such a closed area, a dangerous, outlaw area. My time in the Zona was a time outside of society, almost out of the real world. And the girls there had such a sense of irony and sarcasm. They were also really interested in my film. They'd be like, "Thank God we live in Mexico, because our kind of prostitution has a heart. We wouldn't want to sit behind a glass cage or be sold by our own mothers. We have free will."
When the Obama administration passed the net neutrality rules in 2015, even when we were winning, I favored trying to get these rules in a statute, because I feel that the best way to establish predictability for the marketplace is to make sure they're not subject to the whims of a partisan vote at the FCC.
Love is mutually feeding each other, not one living on another like a ghoul.
Sometime I'm going to do an essay called 'The Virtues of Amateurism' for all of those people who wish they earned their living in the arts. The market kills more artistic people than anything else. It's a world of safety out there, for most people. They want safety, the magazines and manufacturers give them safety, give them homogeneity, give them the familiar and comfortable, don't challenge them.
I will not allow people to impose rules on me that don't make sense to me. And I live and work very much outside the literary world and the literary system. What they think and what they believe and what their rules are mean nothing to me.
For a long time, I was living my life my way and not God's way. I wasn't living it by his rules, I was living it by my own rules. And that didn't get me anywhere. I got to the point where I had no hope.
Safety is the most basic task of all. Without sense of safety, no growth can take place. Without safety, all energy goes to defense
Business as usual doesn't work, that we're in a time where we have to rethink a lot of the basic ground rules and assumptions of our civilizations.
I would never do anything outside of the rules of play.
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