Abhiraj

“Ah! my brother," said a chieftain to his white
guest, "thou wilt never know the happiness of both thinking of nothing and doing nothing. This, next to sleep, is the most enchanting of all things. Thus we were before our birth, and thus we shall be after death. Thy people ... when they have finished reaping one field, they begin to plough another; and, if the day were not enough, I have seen them plough by moonlight. What is their life to ours,—the life that is as naught to them? Blind that they are, they lose it all! But we live in the present.”
― William James, On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings

“All right," I said, still wishing we could talk about Zima rather than me. "But what practical difference does it make whether the artificial memory is inside my head or outside?"

"All the difference in the world," Zima said. "The memories stored in the AM are fixed for eternity. You can query it as often as you like, but it will never enhance or omit a single detail. But the implants work differently. They're designed to integrate seamlessly with biological memory, to the point where the recipient can't tell the difference. For that very reason they're necessarily plastic, malleable, subject to error and distortion."

"Fallible," I said.

"But without fallibility there is no art. And without art there is no truth.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Zima Blue and Other Stories

“In reality, the true painter, as you know, possesses within himself—in his muscles, his sensibility, even in his thinking—the golden number or numbers and the laws of color; he possesses them, he has earned them, he makes them live through everything he experiences and sees, not just on the canvas: his work is therefore both useful and universal.”
― René Daumal, A Night of Serious Drinking

“Therefore he was very far from regarding himself as a paradigm, a pattern or example to be followed; but, condemned to be the exception, he was able at last to comfort himself with the thought that as such he was a "corrective" and, alas, a "sacrifice".”
― Walter Lowrie, A Short Life of Kierkegaard