The Dark Forest (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #2)

by Liu Cixin

Growing up, his father had used silence rather than speech to educate him, and words were merely the punctuation between the silences.

even a question?” “Sure. For the majority of people, what they love exists only in the imagination. The object of their love is not the man or woman of reality, but what he or she is like in their imagination. The person in reality is just a template used for the creation of this dream lover. Eventually, they find out the differences between their dream lover and the template. If they can get used to those differences, then they can be together. If not, they split up. It’s as simple as that. You differ from the majority in one respect: You didn’t need a template.”

Perhaps the outside world really was something akin to a quantum state, and did not exist unless he observed it.

Winter was a season for thinking.

A realm where both self and other are forgotten, an effort to encompass everything by shutting out everything.”

he imagined the universe as holographic, every point containing the whole, so that the entire universe endured so long as one atom remained.