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

by Liu Cixin

The turbulence was purposeless, but in huge quantities of purposeless turbulence, purpose took shape.

Life needed smoothness, but it also needed direction. One could not always be returning to the point of origin.

for constant forgetting was part of life.

“I’ve got to learn how to live. If I can’t swing that, it’ll be a damn shame,” Luo Ji said as he watched the passing traffic.

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

Real shrewdness means not letting any shrewdness show. It’s not like in the movies. The truly astute don’t sit in the shadows all day striking a pose. They don’t show off that they’re using their brains. They look all carefree and innocent. Some of them are tacky and mawkish, others careless and unserious. What’s critical is not to let others think you’re a person of interest. Let them look down on you or dismiss you and they won’t feel you’re an obstacle. You’re just a broom in the corner. The pinnacle of this is to make them not notice you at all, as if you don’t exist until the moment right before they die at your hands.”

What a literary character does in ten minutes might be a reflection of ten years’ experience.

What he wanted wasn’t a fireplace, but the glow of the fire, for it is in firelight that a woman is most beautiful.

“When twilight fades, you can see the stars. When dawn fades, all that’s left is…” “All that’s left is the harsh light of reality.”

The highest level of literary creation is when the characters in a novel possess life in the mind of the writer. The writer is unable to control them, and might not even be able to predict the next action they will take. We can only follow them in wonder to observe and record the minute details of their lives like a voyeur. That’s how a classic is made.”

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.”

“Choose a direction that, even if you’re unsuccessful, will do something beneficial while it is being carried out.”

She’s knowledgeable, but not to the point where it calcifies her.

people who are sensitive to beauty are good by nature, and if they’re not good, then they can’t appreciate beauty.”

The love of his wife and child blended together and intoxicated his soul, and, in this gentle home isolated from the rest of the world, he had fallen deeper and deeper into an illusion: Perhaps the outside world really was something akin to a quantum state, and did not exist unless he observed it.

Don’t dismiss simplicity. Simple means solid.

Time is the one thing that can’t be stopped. Like a sharp blade, it silently cuts through hard and soft, constantly advancing. Nothing is capable of jolting it even the slightest bit, but it changes everything.

No matter what the future might bring, the present is most important.

“There are no permanent enemies or comrades, only permanent duty.”

“I see something else,” he said. “Something far more sublime. A realm where both self and other are forgotten, an effort to encompass everything by shutting out everything.”

Exponentials are the devils of mathematics.

“The universe is a dark forest. Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out. This is the picture of cosmic civilization. It’s the explanation for the Fermi Paradox.”