Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

you should not believe a thing only because you like to believe it.

a way that had seemed easier at the time but made things harder—no, impossible—later.

this is so much a part of my life as a software developer. short sighted decisions made for the sake of expediency can make change harder or (nearly) impossible in the future.

“I always tend to assume there’s an infinite amount of money out there.” “There might as well be,” Arsibalt said, “but most of it gets spent on pornography, sugar water, and bombs. There is only so much that can be scraped together for particle accelerators.”

Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All

wouldn’t want to live her life under the sway of such ideas any more than she’d want to cook breakfast with a machine that she couldn’t understand and fix.

In a book that is a very odd kind of cyberpunk, in structure and feel at least, the main characters live without the saturation of technology we expect to see in the genre.

What is this thing we call the past? It is a system of records encoded in our nerve tissue—records that tell a consistent story.”

“Artificial Inanity

somewhere down the line, where a difficult decision needs to be made, what grounds will we have for evaluating possible decisions, if we’ve already thrown rational analysis to the wind?”

The Hylaean Flow brings about convergent development of consciousness-bearing systems across worldtracks!’

turns out that sufficiently smart people locked up on crags with nothing to do but think can actually come up with forms of praxis that require no tools and are all the more terrifying for that.

“The mystic nails a symbol to one meaning that was true for a moment but soon becomes false. The poet, on the other hand, sees that truth while it’s true but understands that symbols are always in flux and that their meanings are fleeting.” “Someone

And so he had an instinctive skepticism of any system of thought, religious or theorical, that pretended to encompass that miracle, and in so doing sought to draw limits around it.