Anathem

by Neal Stephenson

But I knew that he would not attack me now because I was showing respect for something that he thought was fascinating.

But unbidden and unwanted thoughts are the hardest to expel from one’s mind.

“The man who looks at a mole on his brow every day when he shaves may not see that it is changing; the physician who sees it once a year may easily recognize it as cancer.”

“It is what you don’t expect,” he’d said, “that most needs looking for.”

I went straight to the most intense and saturating grief I had ever known.

They didn’t care for our knowledge, our opinions. And so all of us—all the avout—were reacting in the same way to that: to hell with them!