Everafter

“There are two ways to go to the gas chamber, free and not free.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

“The monster is only scary while it is in the closet.
Once in the light,
you can see its many flaws
and weaknesses.

And often,
we end up laughing,
at what we shield our eyes from
no more.”
― Tom Althouse, The Frowny Face Cow

“When a man is standing at the top of a cliff, it isn’t fear of falling that keeps him rooted to the edge — it’s the fear of not being able to resist the desire to jump, just to see what falling feels like.”
― Cristelle Comby, Russian Dolls

“I can imagine some other world in which a conference of learned, and totally blind, bat-like creatures is flabbergasted to be told of animals called humans that are actually capable of using the newly discovered inaudible rays called "light" for finding their way about. These otherwise humble humans are almost totally deaf (well, they can hear after a fashion and even utter a few ponderously slow, deep drawling growls, but they only use these sounds for rudimentary purposes like communicating with each other; they don't seem capable of using them to detect even the most massive objects). They have, instead, highly specialized organs called "eyes" for exploiting "light" rays. The sun is the main source of light rays, and humans, remarkably, manage to exploit the complex echoes that bounce off objects when light rays from the sun hit them. They have an ingenious device called a "lens", whose shape appears to be mathematically calculated so that it bends these silent rays in such a way that there is an exact one-to-one mapping between objects in the world and an "image" on a sheet of cells called the "retina". Theses retinal cells are capable of, in some mysterious way, of rendering the light "audible" (one might say), and they relay their information to the brain. Our mathematicians have shown that it is theoretically possible, by doing the right highly complex calculations, to navigate safely through the world using these light rays, just as effectively as one can in the ordinary way using ultrasound -- in some respects even more effectively! But who would have thought that a humble human could do these calculations?”
― Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design