Tom B. Night > Quotes

“There's nothing quite so terrifying as being unsure of your own sanity. All other concerns are downstream.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“There were many slippery slopes to nihilism in this new world, and the higher up you were the easier it was to fall down one of them.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“I used to wish I’d have nightmares—what a pleasure it would have been to wake up. If all your dreams are terrifying, reality actually becomes something to look forward to.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“Besides, what good was knowing where you were if you didn’t know where you were from or going?”
― Tom B. Night, Circadian Algorithms

“Don’t give up or in. As someone, though I don’t remember who, once said: Think of the perseverance and resilience of non-human animals in the face of unfathomable hardships. Bide your time. Avoiding ruin is paramount in game theory. Quitting the game entirely cancels all possible future upside. You must survive.”
― Tom B. Night, Circadian Algorithms

“A society’s technological dependence increases exponentially over time, as does its helplessness when deprived of it.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“And you only remember the dreams you have immediately before waking, if you remember them at all. You could dream about all kinds of things without realizing it.”
― Tom B. Night, Circadian Algorithms

“Once upon a time the only thing that couldn't be taken from someone under any circumstances was their own attitude and thoughts. A sufficiently trained and powerful mind could always take refuge in itself. But Keli knew all too well this was no longer the case; when you strip away the layers of abstraction we're merely chemical reactions and electric pulses, both of which can be manipulated.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“There's a brute fact at the end of every chain of causality. Some are just harder to accept than others. If you keep asking 'why' in any domain you eventually arrive at something that just seems to be true about reality, at least insofar as we understand it.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“...self-reported subjective anecdotes aren’t exactly reliable, especially when people are primed to believe something beforehand. We’re notoriously bad witnesses of our own experiences...”
― Tom B. Night, Circadian Algorithms

“Hate and love were each powerful motivators on their own, but together they provided an endless source of energy.”
― Tom B. Night, Circadian Algorithms

“The important thing to remember when talking to a venture capitalist is that they're in an industry where they only need to be right ten percent of the time.”
― Tom B. Night, Circadian Algorithms

“We stood on the shoulders of giants, but we fell off.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“Having kids was like crossing a singularity’s event horizon: It was impossible to foresee the subsequent changes, and impossible to go back.”
― Tom B. Night, Circadian Algorithms

“Very few people who study the relevant subject matter like neuroscience or physics—even philosophy—are ‘metaphysical libertarians,’ or those who believe in what most people think of as free will. It’s a fitting name because it’s basically a prerequisite for being a political libertarian, and like political libertarians, they haven't really thought it through.”
― Tom B. Night, Circadian Algorithms

“But at this point I know I'm only remembering the last time I remembered, an increasingly distorted recursion reaching back in time.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“He'd been younger then, when sex meant both nothing and everything.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“But she couldn’t help wondering if perhaps on some level we craved the paradoxical sense of loneliness and anonymity found in an overcrowded metropolis.”
― Tom B. Night, Circadian Algorithms

“...life is a war we all lose in the end, but every day is a battle, and you can sure as hell win some of those.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“You’ll never make the news if you waste all your time watching it.”
― Tom B. Night, Circadian Algorithms

“Darwin thought of that riddle about how you can only run halfway into the woods because then you’re running out. Maybe life was the same, and he had passed the halfway point. Maybe it wasn’t an accident that our greatest aspirations and nightly outrageous fantasies shared the same word: dreams.”
― Tom B. Night, Circadian Algorithms

“It’s 2020, and everything is fucked.”
― Tom B. Night, Circadian Algorithms

“A not-so-subtle reminder that anyone can lose everything at any time, though few think it will happen to them and none get the chance to realize it did when it does.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“But the surest way to live a worthwhile, meaningful life was to have already done so, those moments etched forever into the fabric of spacetime.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“...how can someone who may be losing his mind accurately assess his own sanity?”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“Theoretically the only tool you really needed to survive was a gun; everything else could be taken from others who lacked one.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“How spectacularly things shine when viewed from the darkness...”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“An actual fucking gun riding shotgun. Who had he become? It was insane how fast everything could change, especially for the worse.”
― Tom B. Night, Circadian Algorithms

“With a fixed amount of matter and energy in the universe, everything is a zero-sum game on some level.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter

“There was no need to burn our ships upon arrival, like the explorers of old, to ensure the crew's dedication to the mission. Instead, we'd burned our home.”
― Tom B. Night, Mind Painter