More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Sam’s doctor said to him, “The good news is that the pain is in your head.” But I am in my head, Sam thought.
How much of your life had been happenstance? How much of your life had been a roll of the big polyhedral die in the sky? But then, weren’t all lives that way? Who could say, in the end, that they had chosen any of it?
“It’s like finding out the things you believed in as a child are actually real.”
that world feels more real to me than, like, the world world, anyway. I love that world more, I think, because it is perfectible. Because I have perfected it. The actual world is the random garbage fire it always is. There’s not a goddamn thing I can do about the actual world’s code.”
“What is a game?” Marx said. “It’s tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow. It’s the possibility of infinite rebirth, infinite redemption. The idea that if you keep playing, you could win. No loss is permanent, because nothing is permanent, ever.”
“And what is love, in the end?” Alabaster said. “Except the irrational desire to put evolutionary competitiveness aside in order to ease someone else’s journey through life?”
“You are happy, and you are bored. You need to find a new pastime.”
the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.
Once you loved someone, you repeated it until they were tired of hearing it. You said it until it ceased to have meaning.
“The knowledge and experience we have—it isn’t necessarily that helpful, in a way.” “So depressing,” Sam said, laughing. “What’s all of this struggle been for?”
You couldn’t be old and still be wrong about as many things as she’d been wrong about, and it was a kind of immaturity to call yourself old before you were.
