They lived like monkeys still, while their new god powers lay around them in the weeds.
The word of God came down to man as rain to soil, and the result was mud, not clear water. (Bistami) Pg. 128
The vaunted experience of age was perhaps only a matter of wounds and scarring — that young minds to old minds might be as young bodies to old bodies: stronger, more vital, less twisted by damage.
You just don’t have faith!” Frank repeated.”Well I hope I never get it! It’s like being hit by a hammer in the head!
We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.
You have a mind like the rings of Saturn. A million miles wide and an inch deep.
Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.
The rational reasons were all rationales for an underlying irrationality.
He was not interested in what they were doing, not any of it— it was both ugly and abstract, a continuous manipulation of people devoid of any of the tangible rewards that so much work had. That’s politics….
The triviality of the current scene usually put her off, but now she supposed that the politics of the moment always looked petty and stupid; only later did it take on the look of respectable statecraft, of immutable History.
Efficiency was just a measurement of how fast money moved from the poor to the rich. We prefer the opposite of efficiency, which is to say, justice.
All the repetitions in the pattern were superficial; the moment was always new. It had to be lived, and then the next moment embraced as it arrived.
Nothing was ever normal again.Many lives change like that — all of a sudden, and forever.
Individuals make history, but it’s also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand.
All the great moments of history have taken place inside people’s heads.
The idea that each corporation can be a feudal monarchy and yet behave in its corporate action like a democratic citizen concerned for the world we live in is one of the great absurdities of our time—
You can’t choose your childhood, it’s just what happens to you. But after that you choose. And that’s really what (makes you).
It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.
It was that sort of sleep in which you wake every hour and think to yourself that you have not been sleeping at all; you can remember dreams that are like reflections, daytime thinking slightly warped.
Childhood isn’t just those years. It’s also the opinions you form about them afterward. That’s why our childhoods are so long.
It is a long time ago. So many lives ago–I get them all confused, don’t you?
The people are suffering. Relieving people’s poverty ought to be handled as though one were rescuing them from fire, or saving them from drowning. One cannot hesitate.
Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire, bacteria feel desire. Life is wanting.
They tell each other what they are thinking. But there is no reason to believe anything they say.
Bold didn’t know what he felt, it changed minute by minute.
Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since
Allah protect us,’ Bold said politely. Then, in Arabic, ‘In the name of God, the merciful, the compassionate.’ In his years in Temur’s army he had learned to be as much a Muslim as anyone. The Buddha did not mind what you said to be polite.
And Sarah still looked like the sexiest librarian on earth, which is as those of you who frequent libraries know means very sexy indeed, but with that added owlish touch that drives you wild.
…knowing too that [the sky] was just a kind of rainbow made it glorious. A rainbow that was blue everywhere and covered everything.
You can never properly predict the future as it really turns out. So you are doing something a little different when you write science fiction. You are trying to take a different perspective on now.
We should conceive of ourselves not as rulers of Earth, but as highly powerful, conscious stewards: The Earth is given to us in trust, and we can screw it up or make it work well and sustainably.