“Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality.”
― Xenocide
― Xenocide
“When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tup and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank into sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.”
― The Bell Jar
― The Bell Jar
“Earthborn animals do this thing, inside their brains—a sort of firing-off of synapses, controlled insanity. While they’re asleep. The part of their brain that records sight or sound, it’s firing off every hour or two while they sleep; even when all the sights and sounds are complete random nonsense, their brains just keep on trying to assemble it into something sensible. They try to make stories out of it. It’s complete random nonsense with no possible correlation to the real world, and yet they turn it into these crazy stories. And then they forget them. All that work, coming up with these stories, and when they wake up they forget almost all of them. But when they do remember, then they try to make stories about those crazy stories, trying to fit them into their real lives.
…They change what their stories mean. They transform things so that the same memory can mean a thousand different things. Even from their dreams, sometimes they make up out of that randomness something that illuminates everything.
…Even if the vast majority of them are wrong, even if ninety-nine of every hundred is stupid and wrong, out of those thousands of ideas that still leaves them with a hundred good ones. That’s how they make up for being so stupid and having such short lives and small memories.”
― Xenocide
…They change what their stories mean. They transform things so that the same memory can mean a thousand different things. Even from their dreams, sometimes they make up out of that randomness something that illuminates everything.
…Even if the vast majority of them are wrong, even if ninety-nine of every hundred is stupid and wrong, out of those thousands of ideas that still leaves them with a hundred good ones. That’s how they make up for being so stupid and having such short lives and small memories.”
― Xenocide
“Every one of us is the sum total of his own thoughts”
― The Strangest Secret
― The Strangest Secret
Elyon’s 2025 Year in Books
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