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“There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. Its hard to live in all those kinds of times. Easy to forget that you live in all of them.”
― Spin
― Spin
“We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.”
― Spin
― Spin
“I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.”
― Darwinia
― Darwinia
“You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters.”
― Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
― Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
“Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that's why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.”
― The Chronoliths
― The Chronoliths
“Stick out your arms," he'd say, "straight out at your sides," and when he had you in the appropriate cruciform position he'd say, "Left index finger to right index finger straight across your heart, that's the history of the Earth. You know what human history is? Human history is the nail on your right-hand index finger. Not even the whole nail. Just that little white part. The part you clip off when it gets too long. That's the discovery of fire and the invention of writing and Galileo and Newton and the moon landing and 9/11 and last week and this morning. Compared to evolution we're newborns. Compared to geology, we barely exist”
― Spin
― Spin
“Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be settled by the storm.”
― Spin
― Spin
“I want a better Bible, Adam. I want a Bible in which the Fruit of Knowledge contains the Seeds of Wisdom, and makes life more pleasurable for mankind, not worse. I want a Bible in which Isaac leaps up from the sacrificial stone and chokes the life out of Abraham, to punish him for the abject and bloody sin of Obedience. I want a Bible in which Lazarus is dead and stubborn about it, rather than standing to attention at the beck and call of every passing Messiah.”
― Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
― Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
“I appreciated her bluntness. Maybe it came with her sudden sobriety. Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it.”
―
―
“What a person runs from and what a person runs to aren't always as different as we hope.”
― Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
― Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
“What is inevitable is not death but change. Change is the only abiding reality. The metaverse evolves, fractally and forever. Saints become sinners, sinners become saints. Dust becomes men, men become gods, gods become dust.”
― Vortex
― Vortex
“The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.”
― Spin
― Spin
“When people come to understand how big the universe is and how short a human life is, their hearts cry out. Sometimes it’s a shout of joy: I think that’s what it was for Jason; I think that’s what I didn’t understand about him. He had the gift of awe. But for most of us it’s a cry of terror. The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence.”
― Spin
― Spin
“Then his expression softened, as if he had solved a troublesome riddle. He smiled. "You do it," he said. Then he stepped over the edge.”
― Blind Lake
― Blind Lake
“By definition, you can’t experience your own death. Death is the end of consciousness. And consciousness persists. In the language of physics, consciousness is conserved.
I am the one who wakes up in the morning.
Always.
Every morning.
I don’t die.
I just become increasingly unlikely.”
― Divided by Infinity
I am the one who wakes up in the morning.
Always.
Every morning.
I don’t die.
I just become increasingly unlikely.”
― Divided by Infinity
“Fifteen minutes shy of two o’clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity.”
― Spin
― Spin
“[A]ll the...people who visited me out of a sense of duty, who were relentlessly sympathetic and secretly indifferent.”
― Axis
― Axis
“Sandra had studied psychiatry in order to understand the nature of despair, but all she had really learned was the pharmacology of it. The human mind was easier to medicate than to comprehend.”
― Vortex
― Vortex
“When people come to understand how big the Universe is and how short a human life is, their hearts cry out. Sometimes it's a shout of joy. But for most of us it's a cry of terror. The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence".”
―
―
“Certainly it's a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don't seem as bad as the Dominion histories make them out to be. Though clearly they were imperfect."
"I don't deny that they were imperfect," Julian said in a distant voice. "I'm not uncritical of the Secular Ancients, Adam. They had all sorts of vices, and they committed one sin for which I can never bring myself to entirely forgive them."
"What sin is that?"
"They evolved into us," he said.”
― Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
"I don't deny that they were imperfect," Julian said in a distant voice. "I'm not uncritical of the Secular Ancients, Adam. They had all sorts of vices, and they committed one sin for which I can never bring myself to entirely forgive them."
"What sin is that?"
"They evolved into us," he said.”
― Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
“Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it.”
― Spin
― Spin
“Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?” “I've never been accused of poetry before.”
― A Bridge of Years
― A Bridge of Years
“I was east of Skepticism and north of Faith, with an unsettled compass and variable winds. But I could offer up a prayer as well as the next man, and leave it to Heaven to judge the result.”
― Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
― Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America
“Guilford thought he knew what science was. It was nothing more than curiosity … tempered by humility, disciplined with patience. Science”
― Darwinia
― Darwinia
“Ci sono diversi tipi di tempo. Quello con cui misuriamo la nostra vita. I mesi e gli anni. O il grande tempo, quello che muove, solleva le montagne e crea le stelle. O tutte le cose che accadono tra due battiti cardiaci. È difficile vivere in tutti questi tempi. Ed è facile dimenticare che li si vive tutti quanti.”
― Spin
― Spin
