Quotes

Butler’s novel [Parable of the Sower] is brutal and soaring. I guess there’s a word people sometimes use for that combination: biblical.

Humility is not the opposite of confidence. They are duals. Confidence is knowing your abilities. Humility is knowing your limits.

From Louisiana, he followed the hyphens in the road that blurred together toward a faraway place, bridging unrelated things as hyphens do.

The greatest religious problem today is how to be both a mystic and a militant; in other words how to combine the search for an expansion of inner awareness with effective social action, and how to feel one’s true identity in both.

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.

The post-Watergate era, the post-AIDS era, the post-9/11 era: we have become a nation of PTSD, a nation that cannot shut off the hunt for meaning and terror in each and every thing.

So Lyra and her daemon turned away from the world they were born in, and looked toward the sun, and walked into the sky.

“The Specters feast as vampires feast on blood, but the Specters’ food is attention. A conscious and informed interest in the world. The immaturity of children is less attractive to them.”

“Maybe sometimes we don’t do the right thing because the wrong thing looks more dangerous, and we don’t want to look scared, so we go and do the wrong thing just because it’s dangerous. We’re more concerned with not looking scared than with judging right. It’s very hard.”

Next time you hear someone say ‘he’s such a gossip’, understand the statement to be ‘he’s such an effective processor of socially-embedded information.’

In Connecticut, the Governor’s council took one look at the sky and decided to call it quits. Go home and wait for the angelic hosts to roll in. ‘Close it up. Lights out.’ One of them, however, wasn’t having it: ‘I am against adjournment. The day of judgment is either approaching, or it is not. If it is not, there is no cause for an adjournment; if it is, I choose to be found doing my duty. I wish therefore that candles may be brought.’ The skies are dark. So are our prospects. Let’s get back to work anyway. Bring the candles.

Death, no matter our desires
Can’t be distracted. We know this much is true,
And it’s true for all souls: each of us will one day
Find the feast finished and, fattened or famished,
Step slowly backward into their own dark hall
For that final night of sleep.

I’d rather die deceived by dreams than give
My heart to home and trade and never live.

And even as we write this final sentence, the sentence that will not be revised, we confess to being certain of one and only one thing – we swear to keep, on penalty of death, this one promise: We will live!

Society loves a rule breaker, but only because it has the herd immunity of social contracts.

My enemies must nominate themselves; I have no interest at all in making, finding, or knowing them.

May I try to tell you again where your only comfort lies? It is not in forgetting the happy past. People bring us well-meant but miserable consolations when they tell us what time will do to help our grief. We do not want to lose our grief, because our grief is bound up with our love and we could not cease to mourn without being robbed of our affections.

To his venerable master A., greeting. This is to inform you that I am studying at Oxford with great diligence, but the matter of money stands greatly in the way of my promotion, as it is now two months since I spent the last of what you sent me. The city is expensive and makes many demands. I have to rent lodgings, buy necessaries, and provide for many other things which I cannot now specify. Wherefore I respectfully beg your paternity that by the promptings of divine pity you may assist me, so that I may be able to complete what I have well begun.

He remembers those vanished years. As though looking through a dusty window pane, the past is something he could see, but not touch. And everything he sees is blurred and indistinct.

The flesh surrenders itself, he thought. Eternity takes back its own. Our bodies stirred these waters briefly, danced with a certain intoxication before the love of life and self, dealt with a few strange ideas, then submitted to the instruments of Time. What can we say of this? I occurred. I am not… yet, I occurred.

Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.

‘My father, that old snake, didn’t pass on the secret. He died without telling me. He took it to the grave. Skinflint scoundrel!’

‘You see, it’s turned out very well. Come on, come on. Let’s go together, you and I. You’ll cast bells. I’ll paint icons. We’ll go to Trinity Monastery together. What a feast day for the people. You’ve brought them such joy, and you’re crying.’

But what is grief, if not love persevering?

I don’t expect that anyone will be reading my stuff after I die — I expect that I’ll be wholly forgotten before I die, if I live to a good age — but I almost never think about that. At the end of Middlemarch George Eliot says of Dorothea that “the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts,” and that captures better than I can my convictions on this point. Diffusive is the key word: an influence that subtly spreads, perhaps without anyone noticing. I find that model of influence more encouraging and comforting than any hopes for fame could ever be.

It had always rained in western Oregon, but now it rained ceaselessly, steadily, tepidly. It was like living in a downpour of warm soup, forever.

‘I thought you could change the world. Is this the best you could do for us - this mess?’

‘It’ll have to do.’

And look at that: the more I know about her, the less inclined I feel to pass a too-harsh or premature judgement. Some essential mercy in me has been switched on. What God has going for Him that we don’t is infinite information. Maybe that’s why He’s able to, supposedly, love us so much.

For me the ADD really is a part of my identity — not my persona, which is what I present to the world, but my innermost self, the way I am actually am. I would be a different person without it. I might be a better person, or a happier or more successful one (I don’t know) but I’d definitely be someone different. And it’s really not all bad. I understand that for many people ADD is a really major problem with no upsides. For me it’s a major problem with upsides. […] I sometimes imagine that the Devil offers me a deal: I will give up the ADD in return for a million dollars. I would have to think very, very carefully before taking that deal and I don’t know whether I would say yes. But if the Devil came and offered to cure my depression, and the price was my right arm? That question is easy. I would say “sounds great, but what’s the catch?” […] And this is why I find it so very irritating that there is no term for my so-called ⸢attention deficit disorder⸣ that does not have the word “disorder” baked into it. I know what a disorder is, and my ADD isn’t one. […] Why does any deviation from the standard have to be a disorder? Why do we medicalize human variation? […] I don’t think “neurodivergent” is a very good term for how I’m different, not least because it’s vague. But at least it doesn’t frame my unusual and wonderful brain as a “disorder”.

The rain beat against the window panes all night.

‘I have time,’ the skull replied reflectively. ‘It’s really not so good to have time. Rush, scramble, desperation, this missed, that left behind, those others too big to fit into such a small space - that’s the way life was meant to be. You’re supposed to be too late for some things. Don’t worry about it.’

When I was alive, I believed - as you do - that time was at least as real and solid as myself, and probably more so. I said ‘one o’clock’ as though I could see it, and ‘Monday’ as though I could find it on the map; and I let myself be hurried along from minute to minute, day to day, year to year, as though I were actually moving from one place to another. Like everyone else, I lived in a house bricked up with seconds and minutes, weekend and New Year’s Days, and I never went outside until I died, because there was no other door. Now I know that I could have walked through the walls.

‘It all seems a bit unfair, my lord, begging your pardon. What could we have done to save the unicorns? We were afraid of the Red Bull. What could we have done?’

‘One word might have been enough,’ King Lír replied. ‘You’ll never know now.’

The idea you have when you’re young, to reach the edge of what can be done with your abilities and find out what might happen if you went past it? You promise yourself you’ll try but then wake up fifty years later to discover that you were in fact always too sensible to push things until they fell over, in case people thought less of you. In your seventies, though, it doesn’t seem to matter any more what other people think. That’s probably the first phase of your life in which you can actually do what you want. And certainly the last.

Look at yourself - what leaf, what tiny tree
Are you in all the countryside we see?
Look at how small you are, beneath the high
And overarching vastness of the sky -
Examine who are you, do it with care,
Your own assessment says you’re hardly there.
You thought you were a great thing on the earth,
Well satisfied with your extent and worth,
This “greatness” though, is relatively small,
So low you’ll think you’re scarcely there at all,
If you go further on, if you persist,
You’ll find you even doubt that you exist.

I place one step beyond both worlds, and wine
Unearthly and eternal there is mine.

Sam used to say that Marx was the most fortunate person he had ever met - he was lucky with lovers, in business, in looks, in life. But the longer Sadie knew Marx, the more she thought Sam hadn’t truly understood the nature of Marx’s good fortune. Marx was fortunate because he saw everything as if it were a fortuitous bounty. It was impossible to know - were persimmons his favorite fruit, or had they just now become his favorite fruit because there they were, growing in his own backyard? He had certainly never mentioned persimmons before.

‘I knew your mother so well I could play her part. The same with my own mother and grandmother and my childhood best friend, Euna, who drowned in the lake by her cousin’s house. There are no ghosts, but up here’ - she gestured toward her head - ‘it’s a haunted house.’

‘And what is love, in the end?’ Alabaster said. ‘Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?’

She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was still alive.

She could feel herself forgetting all the details of Marx - the sound of his voice, the feeling of his fingers and the way they gestured, his precise temperature, his scent on clothing, the way he looked walking away, or running up a flight of stairs. Eventually, Sadie imagined that Marx would be reduced to a single image: just a man standing under a distant torii gate, holding his hat in his hands, waiting for her.

What makes a person want to shiver in a train station for nothing more than the promise of a secret image? But then, what makes a person drive down an unmarked road in the middle of the night? Maybe it was the willingness to play that hinted at a tender, eternally newborn part in all humans. Maybe it was the willingness to play that kept one from despair.

Art Matters. It matters that this [the generative AI revolution] is happening art-first, poetry-first. I don’t think that was just an accident, I think it was inevitable, and I think that tells us something about learning, language, and the world. It matters that the first staticky voices we’ve dialed in with our massive, multi-billion-parameter arrays are dreamers, confabulators, and improvisers. It matters that Chess and Go, the sites where we first encountered their older, more serious siblings, are artworks. Artworks carved out of instrumental reason. Artworks that, long before computers existed, were spinning beautiful webs of logic and attention. Art is not a precious treasure in need of protection. Art is a fearsome wellspring of human power from which we will draw the weapons we need to storm the gates of the reality studio and secure the future.

The space between two shores is the ocean… and being caught in between feels like drowning. And, really, what is the point of tears among so much salt water?

To light a candle is to cast a shadow…

“Do you think things always have an explanation?”

“Yes. I believe that they do. But I think that with our human limitations we’re not always able to understand the explanations. But you see, Meg, just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.”

“Nobody suffers here,” Charles intoned. “Nobody is ever unhappy.”

“But nobody’s ever happy, either,” Meg said earnestly. “Maybe if you aren’t unhappy sometimes, you don’t know how to be happy.”

You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.

Random thought concerning personal AI ethics: it’s rude to publish something that would take someone longer to read than it took you to write it

Our day-to-day life is bombarded with fortuities or, to be more precise, with the accidental meetings of people and events we call coincidences. “Co-incidence” means that two events unexpectedly happen at the same time, they meet: Tomas appears in the hotel restaurant at the same time the radio is playing Beethoven. We do not even notice the great majority of such coincidences. If the seat Tomas occupied had been occupied instead by the local butcher, Tereza never would have noticed that the radio was playing Beethoven (though the meeting of Beethoven and the butcher would also have been an interesting coincidence). But her nascent love inflamed her sense of beauty, and she would never forget that music. Whenever she heard it, she would be touched. Everything going on around her at that moment would be haloed by the music and take on its beauty. […] Guided by his sense of beauty, an individual transforms a fortuitous occurrence […] into a motif, which then assumes a permanent place in the composition of the individual’s life. […] Without realizing it, the individual composes his life according to the laws of beauty even in times of greatest distress. It is wrong, then, to chide the novel for being fascinated by mysterious coincidences, […] but it is right to chide man for being blind to such coincidences in his daily life. For he thereby deprives his life of a dimension of beauty.

Dog time cannot be plotted along a straight line; it does not move on and on, from one thing to the next. It moves in a circle like the hands of a clock, which - they, too, unwilling to dash madly ahead - turn round and round the face, day in and day out following the same path. In Prague, when Tomas and Tereza bought a new chair or moved a flower pot, Karenin would look on in displeasure. It disturbed his sense of time. It was as though they were trying to dupe the hands of the clock by changing the numbers on its face.

But the fragile edifice of their love would certainly come tumbling down. For that edifice rest on the single column of her fidelity, and loves are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles, they, too, fade away.

Before we are forgotten, we will be turned into kitsch. Kitsch is the stopover between being and oblivion.

If Karenin had been a person instead of a dog, he would surely have long since said to Tereza, “Look, I’m sick and tired of carrying that roll in my mouth every day. Can’t you come up with something different?” And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot by happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.

Still, fascinating as the correspondence [of Flaubert] can be, it is neither a masterwork nor a work. Because “the work”, l’oeuvre, is not simply everything a novelist writes — notebooks, diaries, articles. It is the end result of long labor on an aesthetic project.

There are people whose intelligence I admire, whose decency I respect, but with whom I feel ill at ease: I censor my remarks to avoid being misunderstood, to avoid seeming cynical, to avoid wounding them by some frivolous word. They do not live at peace with the comical. I do not blame them for it; their agelasty is deeply embedded in them, and they cannot help it. But neither can I help it and, while I do not detest them, I give them a wide berth.

It is the most obvious thing, but it is hard to accept, for when one thinks it all the way through, what becomes of all the testimonies that historiography relies on? What becomes of our certainties about the past, and what becomes of History itself, to which we refer every day in good faith, naively, spontaneously? Beyond the slender margin of the incontestable (there is no about that Napoleon lost the battle of Waterloo), stretches an infinite realm: the realm of the approximate, the invented, the deformed, the simplistic, the exaggerated, the misconstrued, an infinite realm of nontruths that copulate, multiply like rats, and become immortal.

Moonlight lay everywhere with the naturalness and serenity no other light is granted.

Once upon a time, it seemed like projecting antisocial behaviours was a rebellious move, but it feels increasingly as though the countercultural statement is just being nice.

I don’t think you can win. It says on the box it’s a tragedy.

We saved what we could.

Carrington: … well? Did you and the young man have a heart-to-heart conversation? How is he?

Harry: He’s asleep. On the floor, with a roll of paper towels as a pillow.

Carrington: Ah… try to remember, Harry—

Harry: No, it’s alright. Let him rest.

Childlike philosophy toys with wild ideas at the boundaries of our understanding. Are these ideas useful or true? Can we plug them in straightaway into our existing conceptions and put them to work? For me, if I was already sure they were false and useless, that would steal away their charm. But to be in a hurry to judge their merits, to want to expunge doubt and wonder so as to settle on a final view that we can put immediately to work, to want to close rather than open — let’s not be in such a rush to grow up. What’s life for if there’s no time to play and explore?

Plagued as they are by drought and wildfire, Californians love to talk about how water is power. They talk less about how power is water. Power flows through the social hierarchies we build to channel it, eroding them along the way. Sometimes it picks up silt over thousands of cycles, depositing it into the deltas we call institutions. You can dam it up to create authority or share it with irrigation.
Every once in a while an unexpected earthquake like the invention of agriculture or nuclear weapons changes the landscape abruptly, but all that power never stops flowing, it just finds a new route back to the source.

If the robot had opened the way with kindness, then they had sealed the deal with the essential glue of friendship: long hours together, doing nothing much.

“I was born in San Francisco, the city the future reached back and made, because it was going to be needed.”

“The caterpillars are very familiar to me… but perhaps they are strange. Everything is strange, in this world. Wherever you look, strangeness blooms.”

A western coast: the great psychic battery of the Anth. Eastern coasts are fine, but western coasts had always been richer in both adventurism and melancholy. It was the California feeling, all throughout history, before and after California.

There is nothing more human than the experience of lying in the dark, wondering: What if I don’t wake up? In that way, sleep becomes existential cross-training: dread faced nightly, and nightly overcome.

“Of course we are friends,” Ingrid said. “We have sat and talked for no reason, about nothing in particular. That’s what friends do.”

The boy had never seen any bird at all, never in his life, but his mind was a human mind, and now it crackled with bird-feeling. He watched the creature’s sharp movements, the saccade of its approach; it switched poses without seeming to occupy the space between them. Here was a creature running at a different frame rate.

I like the stars. It’s the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they’re always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend… I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don’t last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend.

It’s tempting to feel that if a passage of writing is obscure, it must be very deep. But if the water is murky, the bottom might be only an inch below the surface — you just can’t tell.

And there is a joy too in responsibility itself — in the knowledge that what we’re doing on earth, while we live, is being done to the best of our ability, and in the light of everything we know about what is good and true. Art, whatever kind of art it is, is like the mysterious music described in the words of the greatest writer of all, the “sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.”

Optimization today is an empirical science. Our program is a border collie sprinting through the hardware’s obstacle course. If we want her to reach the end faster, we can’t just sit and ruminate on canine physiology until enlightenment strikes. Instead, we need to observe her performance, see where she stumbles, and then find faster paths for her to take.

But science, specifically the science of disease, was all delicious secrets, dark oily pockets of mystery.

I’d always thought, really, that I would treasure a period of unceasing emptiness, that I would easily fill it. But time, I’ve come to realize, is not for us to fill in such great, blank slabs: we speak of managing time, but it is the opposite — our lives are filled with busyness because those thin chinks of time are all we can truly master.

And then there would be Eve, an explorer searching for nothing, adrift in a sea without any memory of what she had once sought or of what she wished to return to.

It is in our nature to be such ungainly, consumptive beasts. To live and labour so we may eat and be eaten. To consume and be consumed in eternity. And to this end, we have built around ourselves the machinery of consumption. It becomes easy to forget, then, that there is true flavour yet, beneath it all. In the fact of such despair, our one saving grace is the ability to make things. And as long as it comes from a place of honesty, fascination, and true flavour… There will always be room for more.”

We live in the kind of world where people end up with their third or fourth or fifth choice because there just isn’t the money in their first choice. Every once in a while you get this glimpse of what the world would be like, not if everyone was perfect, but if just a few more people were just a little bit better than they are. You get this glimpse of a world where people could get by, maybe not with their first choice, but with a close second.

This is what it is to love an artist: The moon is always rising above your house. The houses of your neighbors look dull and lacking in moonlight. But he is always going away from you. Inside his head there is always something more beautiful.

Loud Stone: Didn’t you already mourn for your father, young lady?
Little Stone: Some things should be left well enough alone.
Big Stone: To mourn twice is excessive.
Little Stone: To mourn three times a sin.
Loud Stone: Life is like a good meal.
Big Stone: Only gluttons want more food when they finish their helping.
Little Stone: Learn to be more moderate.
Big Stone: It’s weird for a dead person to be morbid.
Little Stone: We don’t like to watch it!
Loud Stone: We don’t like to see it!
Big Stone: It makes me uncomfortable.

Fyodor Pavlovich was drunk when he heard the news of her death; they say he ran through the streets and began shouting, raising his hands to the sky in joy: “Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace.” But according to other people, he wept like a little child, so much so, it was said, that it was pitiful even to look at him, in spite of all the disgust with him one might feel. It’s very possible that both versions are true — that is, he rejoiced at his liberation and wept for his liberator, at the same time. Indeed, in most cases, even criminals are more naïve and openhearted than we suppose. And we are, too.