Otto > Otto's Quotes

“One describes a tale best by telling the tale. You see? The way one describes a story, to oneself or to the world, is by telling the story. It is a balancing act and it is a dream. The more accurate the map, the more it resembles the territory. The most accurate map possible would be the territory, and thus would be perfectly accurate and perfectly useless.
The tale is the map that is the territory.
You must remember this.”
― Neil Gaiman, American Gods

“How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“ashamed their civilisation had a Diplomatic service at all and so tried to compensate for what they were worried might look to other species suspiciously like a symptom of weakness by ensuring that only the most aggressive and xenophobic Affronters became diplomats, to forestall anybody forming the dangerously preposterous idea the Affront were going soft.”
― Anonymous

“Disappeared without trace,' Tishlin confirmed. 'Most damnable thing, too; nobody's ever just lost a sun before, even if it was a dead one.”
― Anonymous

“An Outside Context Problem was the sort of thing most civilisations encountered just once, and which they tended to encounter rather in the same way a sentence encountered a full stop.”
― Iain M. Banks, Excession

“Meteorites fell through the night sky like a gentle sleet of icefire,”
― Peter F. Hamilton, If at First . . .

“you gotta let go of this whole self thing. Identity changes by the second, you turn into someone else every time a new thought rewires your brain.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“from those humble beginnings we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“Let’s just agree that neither side has a monopoly on assholes. The point is, once you recognize that every human model of reality is fundamentally unreal, then it all just comes down to which one works best.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“It’s the anthropic principle’s evil twin, he thought.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“agnosia”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“agnosia.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“We’re the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.”
― Peter Watts, Echopraxia

“synesthete.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“asymptote,”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“allometry,”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“commissar,”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“in some half-forgotten pesthole of twentieth-century case studies—filed under Cotard’s syndrome—I found Amanda Bates and others of her kind, their brains torqued into denial of the very self.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Phaistos Disk.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“setae”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Electrophoresis.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“how anything in the whole deep multiverse can ever be anything but natural?” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. “You know what I mean.” “It’s a meaningless question. Get your head out of the twentieth century.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“pronking”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“This is how you communicate with a fellow intelligence: You hurt it, and keep on hurting it, until you can distinguish the speech from the screams.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“never humanize your victims. It shouldn’t have been such an issue when dealing with methane-breathing medusae.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“Vision’s mostly a lie anyway,” he continued. “We don’t really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur, just … light and motion. Motion draws the focus. And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton? Saccades, they’re called. Blurs the image, the movement’s way too fast for the brain to integrate so your eye just … shuts down between pauses. It only grabs these isolated freeze-frames, but your brain edits out the blanks and stitches an … an illusion of continuity into your head.”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“agnosia:”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“If you’ve got the senses and reflexes to hide between someone’s saccades, why stop there? Why not do something that really works?”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“fibrodysplasia”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“cortical”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight