Chasm Myth

“Consider all the inanimate matter in the universe, all the dumb atoms, all the mindless molecules, all the oblivious dust grains and pebbles and rocks and iceballs and worlds and stars, all the unthinking galaxies and superclusters, wheeling through the oblivious time-haunted megaparsecs of the cosmic supervoid.
In all that immensity, she had somehow contrived to BE a human being, a microscopically tiny, cosmically insignificant bundle of information-processing systems, wired to a mind more structurally complex than the Milky Way itself, maybe even more complex than the rest of the *whole damned universe*!”
― Alastair Reynolds, Blue Remembered Earth

“Most people learn to save themselves by artificially limiting the content of consciousness.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“If truth is what you seek, then the examined life will only take you on a long ride to the limits of solitude and leave you by the side of the road with your truth and nothing else.”
― Thomas Ligotti , The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“As we should know by now, it is as easy to make fun of religious or scientific visionaries as it is to idolize them. Which attitude is adopted depends on whether or not they tell you what you want to hear.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror