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It’s too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out.
he felt things freely and to the full, and wasn’t much worried about consistency.
I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment.
They were both older, creakier, heavier. That was the way it went.
“Live,” as the Japanese said helpfully, “as if you were already dead.”
There is no heaven or hell, but only reward and punishment, which take the form of this life itself and how it is lived.
Only plants and animals died. But people were animals.
Master and slave wear the yoke together. Anarchy is the only true freedom. So, well, whatever women do, it seems to go against them. If they’re men’s cows, then they work till they drop. But if they’re our queens and goddesses then they only work the harder, because they still have to do the cow work and then the paperwork too!
That sky is cerulean, cobalt, lavender, mauve, violet, Prussian, indigo, aubergine, midnight. Just to look at colour charts with words, the rich intensity of colours, the sounds of the words—he
Cycling up and down the sine wave of her moods was a helpless oscillation that she hated, and anything Michel did in the way of amplitude modulation she appreciated.
Some days the sense of déjà vu returned as palpably as an itch, such that every single event of that day felt like something that had happened before. It was a sensation that became more and more uncomfortable the longer it persisted, she found, until the world became an acute frightful prison, and she nothing more than a creature of fate, a clockwork mechanism unable to do anything that she had not done before in some forgotten past.
capitalism is – a version of feudalism in which capital replaces land, and business leaders replace kings.
Because la salute non si paga, as the Italian workers used to say. Health is not for sale!’
it was a most astonishing planet, that could have so much of the white and so much of the green as well, its orbit so exquisitely situated that at sea level the green burst out and at three thousand metres the white blanketed it utterly
It had been a long time. This too was part of the descent into the city, into civilization. Flirting, seduction – how wonderful all that was when one was interested, when one saw that the other was interested!
‘Terran cultures were all neurotic at their core, and when the neurotic is confronted with the sane, it usually gets more neurotic than ever. And the sane don’t know what to do.’
He no longer tried to give her therapy, he no longer tried always and ever to put the brightest face on things;
contemplate everything that went into its digestion, everything that kept them alive – feel his breath which he had never noted at all, before – and suddenly he would feel breathless – lose his appetite – lose his belief that any such complex system could exist for more than a moment before collapsing into primordial chaos and the simplicities of astrophysics.
