Raphael Carter > Quotes

“Those who wake...do not regret the dream.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“..you can't just break through a person's defenses like thatl the defenses are a part of the person, they are the person. It's our nature to have hidden depths. It's like...skinning a frog and saying, 'Now I understand this frog, because I've seen what's inside it.' But when you skin it, it dies. You haven't understood a frog, you've understood a corpse.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“I want to tell you that it's horrible. I want to tell you that being suppressed makes every moment of existence a torment, because maybe that would help--but it would be a lie. In fact, the most horrible thing is how easy it is to slide into contentment, how hard it is to nourish anger or regret. If you lose the sense of smell, say, or taste, you'd grieve for it; but if you were born without that sense, you'd never miss it. That's how it was for me--the sense was gone, as though it has never been. For the first few years after suppression, I kept myself in misery by sheer effort of will, trying to imagine, every day, what it was that I had lost. But in the end, it became to much trouble. I gave in to the inevitable. I forgot.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“I had recognized her. They had tried to tear her out, but she had lived in me--deep in my heart and secret, nameless and indescribable, yet never entirely gone. She had been a face in the window of every departing train, a form seen from the back on every crowded street, always just out of my sight, always turning away. And I had known her when she came to me, though I could not say it, and though the very thought had sent my mind skidding across the ice into unconsciousness.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“I pulled the Net chip out of my head, cutting her off. The chip was long and white, with many metal legs; cupped in my hand, it looked like some pale, crawling thing that you'd find living under a rock. Vermin.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“...you can't just break through a person's defenses like that; the defenses are a part of the person, they are the person. It's our nature to have hidden depths. It's like...skinning a frog and saying, 'Now I understand this frog, because I've seen what's inside it.' But when you skin it, it dies. You haven't understood a frog, you've understood a corpse.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“dreams don't reveal your hidden desires— if they
did, I'd never be allowed to dream. They don't reveal solutions to your
problems, and they don't foretell the future. They're just the fumes your
brain exhales as it digests the day's new memories and mulches them into
the old.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“We are a machine made by God to write poetry to glorify his creatures. But we're a bad machine, built on an off day. While we were grinding out a few pathetic verses, we killed the creatures we were writing about; for every person writing poems there were a hundred, a thousand, out blowing away God's creation left right and center.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“...you think cabling is unnatural--that's what your arguments all come down to. But it's not. Not between people that really fit. Maya, do you have any idea how unlikely it is that two structures as complex as minds could be joined like that? It's like picking up two stones at random and discovering that they fit together perfectly. It isn't a coincidence, it can't be. They fit together so easily--like reuniting something that should never have been broken, filling in some ancient wound...”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“The transformation was amazing. Ten minutes ago, I'd looked like a typically encrusted old-time Netcaster. Now I looked like a dangerous lunatic with no fashion sense. Stop me before I accessorize again.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“For it is so hard, you see, to be two selves, for all its advantages. One can be attacked through the other, or you can be separated. It is giving up a hostage to the world. Live single: that is my advice to you. Or if you must be two selves, keep them in one body."
"I'll, ah, I'll be sure to keep that in mind", I said.
He nodded. "See that you do.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“I'd caught what cameras call an updraft: just as the viewers got over the first rush of interest, others smelled the excitement and tuned in. The surprise of the newcomers strengthened the scent, attracting still more people, in a spiral that could make the feedback escalate out of control. Wave upon wave of astonishment crashed through me. I tried to look down, but the curiosity of millions forced my head back up. I stood there staring at the whale like someone forced to look into the sun, unable to turn away, though my mind cringed from the sight and my eyes were burning. It was not just an updraft, but riptide: feedback so strong that it flooded out my own emotions and derailed my thoughts. The audience grew so large and so greedy that it wouldn't even let me blink.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“You do love me. You just don't mean by love what I mean by it.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“You think we have a connection because of all the things you've sucked out of my mind by screening, but that isn't real. Trust comes when you've worked with someone for years; it doesn't speed up just because you can think fast, and it doesn't materialize when you stick a cable in someone's head. What you get from screening me isn't friendship, it's data. We're strangers.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“... our love became a patchwork, pieced together out of stolen moments, not quite long enough to keep us warm.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“I love you. And if we can't come to terms with that, then I'd better just go, because it's only going to get more painful.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“I always patch up lies in post-production, anyway. Just be sure to tell me if you ever want them to know you're lying.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“...if you can achieve total intimacy with a piece of cable that costs fifty-nine kopeks, what good is it? How can you say you have something special with a person, when you can get the same thing with anyone in Russia in fifteen minutes?”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“The mind has doors...even as the body does. And when you drill new holes, you tap old hungers.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“...the wires he wore had grown all through him, as the roots of trees replace the flesh of corpses; and the vast coils of the whale's brain wrapped around him like a gray constricting snake. I pitied him: but it was probably stray feedback from the Net...”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“First the bugs divide your mind into parcels that are almost independent--I always picture paper growing up between the wrinkles of the brain like the membrane between cloves of garlic. The ants descend on each clove in turn, carry it off to grayspace, and reconnect it. As this happens, you briefly lose certain capacities, sight, mostly--I was blind for a time, and when the sight came back I was agnosic, and then paralyzed.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“...it changes the central fact of the human condition: that each of us lives behind one set of eyes, and not another; that our own pain is an agony, and another's pain only an abstraction we believe in by an act of faith. It makes impossible all the sins of locality, all the errors that arise from being prisoned in one body and no other--as racism, sexism, classism, and of course and especially nationalism.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“What is a medium like telepresence but the extension--no, the very definition--of ourselves? Are we, who live things at a distance, the same species as our ancestors, we could hear of events in the same town only by going there? If you met a person from that time, would you have any more in common with him than with a whale, or a chimpanzee? You have traveled to meet me with better than seven-league boots; and I have done more math this morning than Pythagoras, and Euclid, and all Ancient Greece and Rome. Surely, if we are human, they were animals; and we a race of gods, if they were men.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“We need them? Is that the best reason you can come up with? He laughed, a rasping, mechanical sound. "The kings of the ocean are gone, and what is our argument for their return? We need them? We? Their murderers? The ones that made the water bitter in their mouths, and killed the food they ate? The ones that made the ocean boil red with their blood for miles around? Men need them? Those vermin? Those stringing insects? Struggling pustulent humanity--needs them? Do you think a whale cares? You might as well need the sun to rise at midnight because you're feeling a bit chilly. Yes, of course, certainly we need them, But the question is, do we deserve them?”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“We need them? Is that the best reason you can come up with? He laughed, a rasping, mechanical sound. "The kings of the ocean are gone, and what is our argument for their return? We need them? We? Their murderers? The ones that made the water bitter in their mouths, and killed the food they ate? The ones that made the ocean boil red with their blood for miles around? Men need them? Those vermin? Those stinging insects? Struggling pustulent humanity--needs them? Do you think a whale cares? You might as well need the sun to rise at midnight because you're feeling a bit chilly. Yes, of course, certainly we need them, But the question is, do we deserve them?”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“We had to do it. But I could not do it to her; and she could do it to me. She did not love me”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“In print news your job is to know things about others, you peer out at the world through an arrow slit. In telepresence you _are known_. If I'd still been writing for a newspaper--if there still were newspapers-- I could have forgotten...”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall

“Feel no regret for roses, autumn too has its delights...How could she say that? Didn't she see that for us there could never be autumn, that we could never sit, as anyone else could sit, beside the fire all day on Sundays in November; that September's leaves, that fall for man and beast alike, were not our leaves to walk in; that October storms would never find us sharing an umbrella? The love of spring had thrived on wine and candles; now in the August of our lives, we needed newspapers and comfortable chairs. But it was impossible. No autumn--only a cold wind that blew through our summer, freezing the leaves in their places before they could motley and fall.”
― Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall