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"But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? Is it a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own? Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us?" — Dec 27, 2025 08:36PM
"But isn't it also pain that often makes us most aware of self? Is it a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from all the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one's own? Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us?" — Dec 27, 2025 08:36PM
“Analysis goes a step farther still, and assures us that those impressions of the individual mind to which, for each one of us, experience dwindles down, are in perpetual flight; that each of them is limited by time, and that as time is infinitely divisible, each of them is infinitely divisible also; all that is actual in it being a single moment, gone while we try to apprehend it, of which it may ever be more truly said that it has ceased to be than that it is.
To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down.”
― The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down.”
― The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
“Dystopia is not always an unhappy place. There are, as it happens, certain dystopias in which it's perfectly possible to be happy as a clam. Vast numbers of people go through life never even realizing that they're in one, might live through the real-time decay from freedom to tyranny and never notice the change.
It basically comes down to wanderlust.
Imagine your life as a path extending through time and society. To either side are fences festooned with signs: No Trespassing, Keep Off the Grass, Thou Shalt Not Kill. These are the constraints on your behavior, the legal limits of acceptable conduct. You are free to wander anywhere between these barriers-- but cross one and you risk the weight of the law.
Now imagine that someone starts moving those fences closer together.
How you react-- whether you even notice-- depends entirely on how much you wandered beforehand. A lot of people never deviate from the center of the path their whole lives, would never understand what all those fringe radicals are whining about; after all, *their* lives haven't changed any. It makes no difference to them whether the fences are right on the shoulder or out past the horizon.
For the rest of us, though, it's only a matter of time before you wander back to a point you've always been free to visit in the past, only to find a fence suddenly blocking your way.”
― Beyond the Rift
It basically comes down to wanderlust.
Imagine your life as a path extending through time and society. To either side are fences festooned with signs: No Trespassing, Keep Off the Grass, Thou Shalt Not Kill. These are the constraints on your behavior, the legal limits of acceptable conduct. You are free to wander anywhere between these barriers-- but cross one and you risk the weight of the law.
Now imagine that someone starts moving those fences closer together.
How you react-- whether you even notice-- depends entirely on how much you wandered beforehand. A lot of people never deviate from the center of the path their whole lives, would never understand what all those fringe radicals are whining about; after all, *their* lives haven't changed any. It makes no difference to them whether the fences are right on the shoulder or out past the horizon.
For the rest of us, though, it's only a matter of time before you wander back to a point you've always been free to visit in the past, only to find a fence suddenly blocking your way.”
― Beyond the Rift
“In the future, there will be opened a gateway and a road to a large and excellent science into which minds more piercing than mine shall penetrate to recesses still deeper.”
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“Professor Johnston often said that if you didn't know history, you didn't know anything. You were a leaf that didn't know it was part of a tree.”
― Timeline
― Timeline
“Knowing that it is the earth we tread, we learn to tread carefully, lest it be rent open. Realizing that it is the heavens that hang above us, we come to fear the echoing thunderbolt. The world demands that we battle with others for the sake of our own reputation, and so we undergo the sufferings bred of illusion. While we live in this world with its daily business, forced to walk the tightrope of profit and loss, true love is an empty thing, and the wealth before our eyes mere dust.”
― The Three-Cornered World
― The Three-Cornered World
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