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The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive.
you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives.
Meaning varies with spatial scale. So we have concluded that communicating with her is not impossible, but it is pointless.
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.
“It is not the brave who can handle the big face, it is the brave who can handle its absence.”
The most sophisticated switches reminisce about shared adventures, exchange memories about a good escapade, swap inside jokes, brag about past feats, and summon up lifetimes of experience.
death switches have established themselves as a cosmic joke on mortality. Humans have discovered that they cannot stop Death, but at least they can spit in his drink.
Computers operate around the clock, sending out the social intercourse of the dead: greetings, condolences, invitations, flirtations, excuses, small talk, inside jokes— codes between people who know each other well.
Everything we adore, abhor, covet, can’t bear, take pleasure in, desire, pursue, crave, aspire to, long for—all these run on top of the planetary program, hidden within the thick forests of its code. Love was not specified in the design of your brain; it is merely an endearing algorithm that freeloads on the leftover processing cycles.
Everything you have ever seen is a manifestation of the same quark, racing around on a space-time superhighway of its own invention.
many places along your bodies at once; you weave your versatile hands over your lover’s multiflorous figure. Your rivers run together. You move in concert as interdigitating creatures of the meadow, entangled vegetation bursting from the fields, caressing weather fronts that climax into thunderstorms.
On their last day, howling because it is the end of their lives, babies climb back into the wombs of their mothers, who eventually shrink and climb back into the wombs of their mothers, and so on like concentric Russian dolls.
