Nick Gloaming

“Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe; it gives life back to those who no longer exist.”
― Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire

“Our god is that which is left when all gods have been listed and marked.”
― Halldór Laxness, The Atom Station

“We lords, at our oars, then? We sweating, pissing, swearing, grunting gentlemen? I think not, Palli. On the galleys we were not lords or men. We were men or animals, and which proved which had no relation I ever saw to birth or blood. The greatest soul I ever met there had been a tanner, and I would kiss his feet right now with joy to learn he yet lived. We slaves, we lords, we fools, we men and women, we mortals, we toys of the gods—all the same thing, Palli. They are all the same to me now.”
― Lois McMaster Bujold, The Curse of Chalion

“Philosophy often appears to its common-sense opponents as a kind of Sigmaringen of ideas, churning out its irrelevant fictions and pretending that it offers the public insights on which the fate of humanity depends, while real life goes on somewhere else, indifferent to philosophical gigantomachias. Is philosophy really a mere theatre of shadows? A pseudo-event impotently mimicking real events? What if its power resides in its very withdrawal from direct engagement? What if, in its Sigmaringen-distance from the immediate reality of events, it can see a much more profound dimension of these same events, so that the only way to orient ourselves in the multiplicity of events is through the lens of philosophy?”
― Slavoj Žižek, Event