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It is a supremely cruel thing to have your mind conjure a desire which it is functionally unable to realize.
“There is no appropriate expression in human language to express the moment at the start of time.”
― Death's End
― Death's End
“We live together, we act on, and react to, one another; but always and in all circumstances we are by ourselves. The martyrs go hand in hand into the arena; they are crucified alone. Embraced, the lovers desperately try to fuse their insulated ecstasies into a single self-transcendence; in vain. By its very nature every embodied spirit is doomed to suffer and enjoy in solitude. Sensations, feelings, insights, fancies—all these are private and, except through symbols and at second hand, incommunicable. We can pool information about experiences, but never the experiences themselves. From family to nation, every human group is a society of island universes.”
― The Doors of Perception
― The Doors of Perception
“Civilization was like a mad dash that lasted five thousand years. Progress begot more progress; countless miracles gave birth to more miracles; humankind seemed to possess the power of gods; but in the end, the real power was wielded by time. Leaving behind a mark was tougher than creating a world. At the end of civilization, all they could do was the same thing they had done in the distant past, when humanity was but a babe: Carving words into stone.”
― Death's End
― Death's End
“The Archean Eon was followed by the Proterozoic Eon, each billions of years; then the Paleozoic: the Cambrian’s seventy million years, the Ordovician’s sixty million years, the Silurian’s forty million years, the Devonian’s fifty million years, the Carboniferous’s sixty-five million years, and the Permian’s fifty-five million years; then the Mesozoic: the Triassic’s thirty-five million years, the Jurassic’s fifty-eight million years, and the Cretaceous’s seventy million years; then the Cenozoic: the Tertiary’s 64.5 million years and the Quaternary’s 2.5 million years. Then humanity appeared. Compared to the eons before, mankind’s history was but the blink of an eye. Dynasties and eras exploded like fireworks; the bone club tossed into the air by an ape turned into a spaceship. Finally, this 3.5-billion-year-long road full of trials and tribulations stopped in front of a tiny human individual, a single person out of the one hundred billion people who had ever lived on the Earth, holding a red switch.”
― Death's End
― Death's End
Max’s 2024 Year in Books
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