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and the young men felt a profound sadness for the fact that people sometimes don't know how to be people. I am only a new city, not a person. I am not a hero. I have never defended my walls. But when people on my streets and in my houses are truly human, I feel heroic. I have remembered these poets. -pg 11

You have been marking the passages that seem to approve of your own character. I find marks against all those sentences which seem to express a sardonic yet passionate nature; a moth-like impetuosity dashing itself against hard glass. You thought, as you drew your pencil there 'I too throw off my cloak like that. I too snap my fingers in the face of destiny.'

Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when, holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather, I was wafted down tunnels.

Also, in the middle, cadaverous, awful, lay the grey puddle in the courtyard, when, holding an envelope in my hand, I carried a message. I came to the puddle. I could not cross it. Identity failed me. We are nothing, I said, and fell. I was blown like a feather, I was wafted down tunnels.

From far away the river's murmur reaches then. The are transported without knowing by what; but I know: they are hearing Madame de T's river; the river from her nights of love; from the well of the past, the age of pleasure is sending Vincent a quiet greeting. -- I'm taking this book as slow as possible so as not to fight the nature (and rant) intended, but it's almost torture... Like prolonging flirting (:

If a woman tells me: I love you because you're intelligent, because you're decent, because you buy me things, because you don't chase women, because you do the dishes, then I'm disappointed; such love seems rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I'm crazy about you even though you're neither intelligent nor decent, even though you're a liar, an egotist, a bastard.

True human goodness, in all its purity and freedom, can come to the fore only when its recipient has no power. Man-kind's true moral test, its fundamental test (which lies deeply buried from view), consists of its attitude towards those who are at its mercy: animals. And in this respect mankind has suffered a fundamental debacle, a debacle so fundamental that all others stem from it.

Why has the pleasure of slowness disappeared? Ah, where have they gone, the amblers of yesteryear? Where have they gone, those loafing heroes of folk song, those vagabonds who roam from one mill to another and bed down under the stars? Have they vanished along with the footpaths, with grasslands and clearings, with nature?

In Tereza's eyes, books were
the emblems of a secret brotherhood. For she had but a single weapon against the
world of crudity surrounding her... They not only offered the possibility of an imaginary escape from a life she found
unsatisfying; they also had a meaning for her as physical objects: she loved to walk
down the street with a book under her arm.

Pioneering works of art can be beautiful, even stunning, but most often -at first- they are baffling, & may even be ugly. The real beauty of a pioneering work of art, no matter how ugly, is in its meaning. A new way of looking at the world is never the familiar warm bed; it's always a chilling cold shower. I find that shower invigorating, bracing, liberating. I think about pioneering work in physics in the same way.

No wonder we talk of experiencing emotional resonance, which can create a relationship filled with richness and depth, and overtones of understanding and tenderness and desire. It's hardly accidental that we want to be "in tune" with someone else. And how painful when we lose that resonance, either temporarily for forever, and what felt like harmony turns into discordant interference and emotional noise.

...You'll see that the sky is bright inside the primary bow, and much darker outside of it and if you carry a linear polariser on you, as you always should, you will confirm that both bows are strongly polarised. You won't be able to resist it, it's a disease that will haunt you for the rest of your life.

It's my fault but I will not be able to cure you and I'm not even sorry for that; not at all.

They dictate and explain the motion of stars, binary stars, star clusters, galaxies and even clusters of galaxies. And Newton's laws deserve credit for the 20th century discovery of what we call dark matter.

His laws are beautiful. Breathtakingly simple and incredibly powerful at the same time. They explain so much and the range of phenomena they clarify is mind boggling.

[on Newton] "His laws changed all of physics and astronomy. His laws made it possible to calculate the mass of the sun and planets. The way it's done is immensely beautiful. If you know the orbital period of any planet, say, Jupiter or the Earth and you know its distance to the Sun; you can calculate the mass of the Sun. Doesn't this sound like magic?"

The progression of shapes is lovely, and delicate, how teeny is the femur of the mouse. Only a teeny weeny little femur for a teeny weenie little mouse. Isn't that beautiful? I will never cease to be amazed by the beauty in every detail of our natural world.

The progression of shapes is lovely, and delicate, how teeny is the femur of the mouse. Only a teeny weeny little femur for a teeny weenie little mouse. Isn't that beautiful? I will never cease to be amazed by the beauty in every detail of our natural world.

"Discovery brings joy. We must do a better job at encouraging lifelong curiosity."

Things like crossbreed anemones and moths froze as we passed, waved sensory limbs behind us. Our cart rutted toward the settlements and animals like rags of paper flew in the hot sky. The farmstead at the end of knotted man-thick tributaries of the pipework was as restless as most architecture. A squirming tower laid young machinery in eggs. The paper-shred birds picked parasite from it. -pg 196

"A corvid dropped us deep in the city, in astonishing rooms, catacombs in the skin, alcoves full of house's organs sutured in place. I'd never seen so many young... They matched their parents in size and shape, but they were children and you could tell by the colour of their bellies and the way they were given to swaying. They were avid spectators while the liars tried to lie."

"At something over a hundred metres it was the tallest building we had. A fat pillar, studed with horizontal boughs and landing pads, to and from which, even so late, bioluminescent corvids moved."

I was jostled among the dress-clothes. I wore jewels and I activated a few augmens that sent a corona of pretty lights around me. I leaned against the wall in the thick leaves.

L

and I feel come over me the sense of the earth under me, and my roots going down and down til they wrap themselves round some hardness at the centre.

"We're drawing close to the end of the twentieth century. Things are different from back in Chekov's time. No more horse-drawn carriages, no more women in corsets. Somehow the world survived the Nazis, the atomic bomb, and modern music. Even the way novels are composed has changed drastically. So it's nothing to worry about."

'But even if you changed the backdrop to something more desirable, is there really a pleasant way to die in this world? And come to think of it, isn't this world we live in itself like a gigantic model room? We come in, sit down, have a cup of tea, gaze out the window at the scenery, & when the time comes we say thank you and leave. All the furniture is fake. Even the moon hanging in the window may be made of paper.'