“Murphy develops a detailed taxonomy of anti-listening behaviours, from the well-known – interrupting, glazing over – to the subtler: finishing people’s sentences; asking questions that prompt a certain answer; jumping into the pauses people leave while gathering their thoughts; internally finessing your own response before you’ve heard the entirety of the thing you are responding to.”
“The other optimisms that died with the hippies are all downstream of this basic failure to bring about a revolution in the nature of human consciousness; the failure to shed the ego, embrace the spirit, glimpse salvation in another dimension.”
“This, I posit, is why a man who laboured in the dark for thirty years is now selling millions of books and embarking on sold-out international lecture tours: Because he makes the case for taking life, and oneself, very seriously.”
“Horror – like the theology that provided its former home – is animated by the full spectrum of human psychology. It is driven by our desire to stop all the clocks, shrink into a bubble of the familiar and the known, reject all things foreign. Equally, it is shot through with the bone-deep knowledge that if we can’t adapt, we will perish.”