Inverted World

by Christopher Priest

I was a married man, and I was six hundred and fifty-two miles old.

During the hours when I was not actually engaged in any of our routine tasks, I was still lost in speculative thought. I could not get out of my mind that spectacle of the manifest appearance of the world on which we existed.

We live by our assumptions; if one took for granted that the world we travelled across was like any other, could any education ever prepare one for a total reversal of that assumption?

Whatever else you may think, this place is not the centre of the universe.” “It is,” he said. “Because if we ever stopped believing that, we would all die.”

He said that one definition of a fanatic was a man who continued to struggle against the odds when all hope was lost.

“Just because a man’s wrong doesn’t mean he’s a fool.”