One Word Kill (Impossible Times, #1)

by Mark Lawrence

On the day he died, he told me: ‘The equations that govern the universe don’t care about “now”. You can ask them questions about this time or that time, but nowhere in the elegance of their mathematics is there any such thing as “now”. The idea of one specific moment, one universal “now” racing along at sixty minutes an hour, slicing through the seconds, spitting the past out behind it and throwing itself into the future . . . that’s just an artefact of consciousness, something entirely of our own making that the cosmos has no use for.’

I was for the first time, in a short and self-absorbed kind of life, starting to really see it for what it was. The beauty and the silliness, and how one piece fitted with the next, and how we all dance around each other in a kind of terror, too petrified of stepping on each other’s toes to understand that we are at least for a brief time getting to dance and should be enjoying the hell out of it.