Emma

“This situation is completely without precedent, and it is now evolving so quickly that we can barely keep track of where we are. And the more technology evolves, the more that new layers of hardware and software are added, the harder it is to change. This is handing tech capitalists a unique source of power. As the Silicon Valley guru Jaron Lanier puts it, they don’t have to persuade us when they can directly manipulate our experience of the world.”
― Richard Seymour, The Twittering Machine

“I had no children, I did not transmit to any creature the legacy of our misery.”
― Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas

“Our pleasures are not lost, nor do they disappear; in another way, they mark us as much as our pains. The one among them which seemed to have vanished forever will save us from a crisis, will plead, unknown to us, against one of our disappointments, against some temptation to abdicate, to surrender; it will create in us new links of which we are not conscious, and reinforce a heap of little hopes which will counterbalance that tendency of our memory to preserve only vestiges of the atrocious, the terrible. For our memory is a venal thing: it sides with our pains, it has sold itself to our sufferings.”
― Emil M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist

“The past had vanished and become nothing; the future was the inconceivable nothingness of annihilation. All that was left was the ceaselessly shrinking fragment of time called 'now'.”
― Anna Kavan, Ice