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“We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.We privileged few, who won the lottery of birth against all odds, how dare we whine at our inevitable return to that prior state from which the vast majority have never stirred?”
― Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
― Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder
“Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people. … The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good.”
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“The weird thing about houses is that they almost always look like nothing is happening inside of them, even though they contain most of our lives. I wondered if that was sort of the point of architecture.”
― The Fault in Our Stars
― The Fault in Our Stars
“As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.
I wish you all very good lives.”
― Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
I wish you all very good lives.”
― Very Good Lives: The Fringe Benefits of Failure and the Importance of Imagination
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