Frankissstein: A Love Story

by Jeanette Winterson

Is this life a disordered dream? Is the external world the shadow, while the substance is what we cannot see, or touch, or hear, yet apprehend?

But there is something of a lighthousekeeper in me, and I am not afraid of solitude, nor of nature in her wildness.

We may lose and we may win though we will never be here again.

Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.

And this poor man is mad – of that there can be no question either. The question, then, to me, is simple: Is his story the result of his madness or its cause? What is the temperature of reality?

The moon is near and bright and under her light the courtyard seems to drift like a silver sea. This voyage of ours is lonely – the more so if we find a companion, only to suffer the bitterest loss.

Only in the living of it does life seem ordinary. In the telling of it we find ourselves strangers among the strange.

The opposite of the past is the present. Anyone can live in a past that is gone or a future that does not exist. The opposite of either position is the present.

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion’, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track – the peculiar bent of my nature pushes me on. Mary Wollstonecraft

He appeared very far from mad, but very often the mad have a deep conviction the sane lack.

I discover that grief means living with someone who is no longer there.