Sea of Tranquility

by Emily St. John Mandel

Surely we might strive to be somewhat more civilized than the maniacal grandson of a Viking raider.”

I am absolutely certain there was not a single thought in my head. It was like a kind of void.”

What if one were to dissolve into the wilderness like salt into water.

Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense.

“I don’t know, maybe this is naïve of me, but I feel like a simulation should be better, you know? I mean, if you were going to the trouble to simulate that street, for example, couldn’t all of the streetlights work?”

“Because we might reasonably think of the end of the world,” Olive said, “as a continuous and never-ending process.”

“My personal belief is that we turn to postapocalyptic fiction not because we’re drawn to disaster, per se, but because we’re drawn to what we imagine might come next. We long secretly for a world with less technology in it.”

this is real

This is the strange lesson of living in a pandemic: life can be tranquil in the face of death.

In the early evenings Gaspery liked to sit on the farthest possible edge of his bunk, almost falling off the end, because from that angle there was a sliver of sky visible through the window, and through it he could see the moon.

this made me emotional

if definitive proof emerges that we’re living in a simulation, the correct response to that news will be So what. A life lived in a simulation is still a life.