71 ratings (3.94 avg)
2 reviews

Vitaliy

Add friend

https://www.goodreads.com/liquidocelot

Vitaliy’s Bookshelves

to-read‎ (40)
currently-reading‎ (0)
read‎ (80)

fiction‎ (2)
programming‎ (2)
detective‎ (1)

favorites‎ (1)
non-fiction‎ (1)
thriller‎ (1)

comics‎ (0)

Stats | More…

Vitaliy’s Notes & Highlights

Book cover for Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1)

Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos, #1) by Dan Simmons

2 highlights

“It occurs to me,” Sol Weintraub said as the group was finishing dessert, “that our survival may depend upon our talking to one another.” “What do you mean?” asked Brawne Lamia. Weintraub unconsciously rocked the child sleeping against his ...more

See Vitaliy’s 6 books with notes and highlights…

Vitaliy’s Quotes

“I was alone in a great spinning wheel surrounded by things that were made out of meat, things that moved all by themselves. Some of them were wrapped in pieces of cloth. Strange nonsensical sounds came from holes at their top ends, and there were other things up there, bumps and ridges and something like marbles or black buttons, wet and shiny and embedded in the slabs of meat. They glistened and jiggled and moved as if trying to escape. I didn’t understand the sounds the meat was making, but I heard a voice from somewhere. It was like God talking, and that I couldn’t help but understand.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

1 likes

“They never experience the past tense. It's just another thread to them. They don't remember stuff, they relive it.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

3 likes

“But I’ve never seen the Icarus story as a lesson about the limitations of humans. I see it as a lesson about the limitations of wax as an adhesive.”
― Randall Munroe, What If?: Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions

213 likes

“The Matterhorn’s summit ridge is not quite what excited journalists like to call “a knife-edge ridge.” Our boot prints in the snow along the actual ridge prove this. Had it been a knife-edge ridge, with snow, our boot prints would have been on both sides, since the smart way to traverse a true knife edge is to hobble slowly along like a ruptured duck, one leg on the west side of the narrow summit ridge, one on the east. A slip then will lead to bruised testicles but not—God and fate willing—a 4,000-foot fall.”
― Dan Simmons, The Abominable

1 likes

“fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations—and after a while everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do. And from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid. Even here in the twenty-first century you can make people more honest just by scribbling a pair of eyes on the wall with a Sharpie. Even now, we are wired to believe that unseen things are watching us. And it came to pass that certain people figured out how to use that. They painted their faces or they wore funny hats, they shook their rattles and waved their crosses and they said, Yes, there are tigers in the grass, there are faces in the sky, and they will be very angry if you do not obey their commandments. You must make offerings to appease them, you must bring grain and gold and altar boys for our delectation or they will strike you down and send you to the Awful Place. And people believed them by the billions, because after all, they could see the invisible tigers.”
― Anonymous

2 likes

More of Vitaliy’s quotes…