the same zoo

"Friends of his had advised him that if he wanted to make it as a creative writer, he should stop savaging other people's work, but you might as well ask a bird not to fly or a cat not to hunt; and besides, what would his poetry be worth if he wrote it while living in the same zoo as all the other denatured animals, safe but not free? And that was without even mentioning the moral duty of the critic to correct  the tendency of culture likewise to err toward safety and mediocrity,  a responsibility you couldn't measure in dinner invitations."

~~ from Kudos by Rachel Cusk

Stephen Wolfram and maths

 

escape is not a reality. . .

"It is interesting how keen people are for you to do something they would never dream of doing themselves, how enthusiastically they drive you to your own destruction: even the kindest ones, the ones that are most loving, can rarely have your interests truly at heart, because usually they are advising you from within lives of greater security and greater confinement, where escape is not a reality but simply something they dream of sometimes. Perhaps, he said, we are all like animals in the zoo, and once we see that one of us has got out of the enclosure we shout at him to run like mad, even though it will only result in him becoming lost."

~~ from Outline by Rachel Cusk

Rachel Cusk's Outline

"The human capacity for self-delusion is apparently infinite--and if that is the case, how are we ever meant to know, except by existing in a state of absolute pessimism, that once again we are fooling ourselves?"

~~ from Outline by Rachel Cusk