More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
The child longs for the responsibilities of adulthood. The adult, crushed by those responsibilities, longs only to be a child again.”
The question is not can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer.
The true horror of existence is not the certainty of death, nor the threat of hell, but the knowledge that we will likely go our entire lives as impossibly complex machines, walking about in an impossibly complex universe, and never truly discover what it was all for. I don’t know is brave. I’ll never know is heroic.
“Shyness is just narcissism for introverts. You’d do well to remember that.”
That’s where we’ll live: between the beginning and end of everything, in the Sunshine Middle of the World. Even if our projects diminish and take us all drowning with them, even if we never find Absolute Meaning, we’ll build and we’ll love. We’ll endure until we can’t. We are the fighters of entropy. All is possible again.
Many will claim they are wise. Do not believe them; the wise are quiet. Many will claim they know nothing. Do not believe them; how could they know that? If you must seek the advice of anyone, make it the drunk. He knows the game means nothing and wins it by not playing.
What straddles a dream and a nightmare? Leo thought. There’s no word for the thing, the grey between hope and despair. That’s where we are now. That’s where we’ll live. In the Overcast Middle of the World.
Lepus said formally, “Eat my dick.”
I’m sorry if those stars and galaxies don’t personally care about you, that’s unfortunate. But do we have to cheapen the majesty of nature by trying to see divine purpose in it? The universe has so far proven to be apathetic about our respective existences. That isn’t warming news, but it is the news, and as adults we’re supposed to be honest with ourselves regarding such a thing.
“The era of false gods is over. Nothing is sacred and everything is possible.”
“Adulthood. Only the wisdom of adulthood.
Science did not kill magic. Yes, we've had to dispense with spells and incantations. Yes, the universe is more apathetic than previously supposed. But in return for accepting these losses, we have gained a picture of the world so unfathomably beautiful and mysterious that if God truly existed, He Himself could not fathom it. - Excerpts from The Empirical Sutras of Lady Ursula
