Genesis

by Bernard Beckett

was one of the Great Mistakes, thinking of brightness as a quality of the past.

the greater the promise, the more spectacular the failure.

The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate, and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.

that’s what thinking is best at: deceiving the thinker.

The world is built on compromise and uncertainty, and such a place is too complex for heroes to flourish.

“The point, as we were taught it, is that there is more to consciousness than mere mechanics. There is a difference between the appearance of thought, and thought itself.

You think the thing you call consciousness is some mysterious gift from the heavens, but in the end consciousness is nothing but the context in which your thinking occurs. Consciousness is the feel of accessing memory. Why else do you not have memories from your earliest years? It is because your consciousness has not fully developed.”

“Knowing starts as a feeling. Understanding is the process of excavation, of clearing a path from feeling to daylight.”