More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
March 5 - March 12, 2023
“That’s what peace is, right? Postponing the conflict until the thing you were fighting over doesn’t matter.”
I love our life, so now I have to be the one who cares and disapproves and doesn’t get to be excited. You’re making me the grown-up. I don’t want to be the grown-up. I want us both to be grown-ups, so that when we do something like this, we both get to be kids.”
you are the smartest, most rigorous and methodical man who ever made every single important choice in his life by impulse.”
A liberal arts background was a hard thing to overcome, but she was doing great.
From when Moses saw the promised land that he could never enter, people have been on their deathbeds just wanting to see what happens next. He wonders if that’s what makes the promised land holy: that you can see it but you can’t quite reach it. The grass is always greener on the other side of personal extinction.
A fast pull across the neck, and Fred could bleed out in four minutes. A stab in the kidney could take hours. Cut the cords that were tying his arms, and it could take years.
If you bring forth that which is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth that which is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.
“Then why do they act like they hate us?” David’s father said with something like triumph. “Because that’s what fear looks like when it needs someplace to go.”
Erich drummed his fingertips against the stolen deck, anxious to reconnect it to the network, to see what was happening and what had changed in the time since they’d left the coffee bar. That being connected would somehow protect him was an illusion, and Erich half knew that. But only half.
It was always pleasant when pain was on the outside.
As a child, growing up, I used to fight back on the last point: She was smart and she was beautiful and anything good about me surely had its roots in her. I believe now she used to denigrate herself in front of me in order to hear praise from someone, even if it was only a beloved child. I don’t resent the manipulation. If intellect and focus were indeed the legacies of my invisible father, emotional manipulation was my mother’s true gift, and it was as valuable. As important.
When, later, my project lead said There is a period of developmental sociopathy in every life, this is the time I thought of.
Heartbreak and relief were my soul’s twin bodyguards.
new attention given to him. Humanity is social, and the self-image of humans is built from the versions of ourselves we see and hear reflected in others;
There is nothing so destructive and also so easy to overlook as a bad idea.
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, but it is the mother of any number of other things as well: sacrifice and monstrosity and metamorphosis. Necessity is the mother of all necessary things, to coin a tautology.
The prospect of a discontinuous cognitive life holds no terror for me, or, I suspect, for anyone in research.
Hope survives even stretched to a single molecule’s thickness.
I lived on the edge of revelation like I could dance in flames and not burn. When the end came, it surprised me.
that was the way time worked. Too fast when you weren’t paying attention, and then slow as mud when you watched it.
always no, but people asked anyway. Church was all about rituals. Standing with the sunlight pressing against her face trying not to be impatient was as much a part of the day as the sermon.
And because it was the most habitable of the new planets by orders of magnitude, it was developed. Because it was developed, it was influential. Because it was influential, it was wealthy. And because it was wealthy, it was corrupt.
The glitter of amusement in her eyes, invisible to anyone but him, meant she saw what he was doing, and that she forgave him his weakness. Or that she enjoyed the power she had over him. They were two ways to say the same thing.
Overdoing is also falling short. Better to have a good night end well than push for perfect and undo what had been achieved.
He was a professional impersonator of himself.
There’s this thing when you get older where you have to make a choice. Everyone does. You have to decide whether you care more about being your best self or your real one. If you’re more loyal to who you ought to be or who you really are.
It’s the basic problem with religion, be it Jesus or Vishnu or God Emperors. Ideological purity never survives contact with the enemy.”
“Can’t wake up,” Filip said. “I died. Dead men don’t wake up.” “You didn’t die.” “Then why do I hurt so much?” “Because you didn’t die,” Mose said with a long, wheezing laugh. “Dead men don’t hurt. That’s being alive.” “Could be in hell,” Filip said.
His past was like a wound that wouldn’t heal. Or a poison.
The only right you have with anyone in this life is the right to walk away.
The universe was always vast, if he thought about it. The trick was not to see more of it than he could stand at any given moment. And picking the right part to look at.
We have no reason to compete, you and I. The only point is that our parents can lay burdens on us, all without meaning to, that we’ll have to carry around for the rest of our lives and there’s nothing we can do about that. But you and I still get to decide how we carry those burdens.”
“Thank you, but I don’t deserve any mercy.” “Of course you don’t. That’s why they call it mercy. If you deserve it, they call it justice.”
There was a logic to survival that didn’t change, no matter which vastness he was traveling through. And the regret was there too, the way it always had been.
Doing the right thing has to be enough in itself. It’s not about getting the pat on the head.
when you look at history, you see the same kind of people doing the same stupid, selfish, delusional, gorgeous, kind, astonishing things that we do today. And we’ll keep doing the same, as long as the species survives. Technical knowledge advances. The organism stays the same.
We’re spending our whole lives together, so we need to be really gentle.
