Vera Paunova

“Do you have any idea what archetypal narratives are?’

‘Messages from the gods, or from the depths of the soul; who can say? But they encode the most profound and mysterious—’

Sachio cut him off impatiently.

‘They’re the product of a few chance attractors in flesher neurophysiology. Whenever a more complex or subtle story was disseminated through an oral culture, it would eventually degenerate into an archetypal narrative. Once writing was invented, they were only ever created deliberately by fleshers who failed to understand what they were. If all of antiquity’s greatest statues had been dropped into a glacier, they would have been reduced to a predictable spectrum of spheroidal pebbles by now; that does not make the spheroidal pebble the pinnacle of the artform. What you’ve created is not only devoid of truth, it’s devoid of aesthetic merit.”
― Greg Egan, The Planck Dive

“And I could go on doing it, walking the convoluted border between meaningless happiness and meaningless despair. Maybe I was lucky; maybe the best way to cling to that zone was to see clearly what lay on either side.”
― Greg Egan, Reasons to be Cheerful

“As for the stars, they were never ours to lose; the truth is, we've lost nothing but the illusion of their proximity.”
― Greg Egan, Quarantine

“I am living in a nightmare, from which from time to time I wake in sleep.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin