Bianca > Bianca's Quotes

“Nothing exists. All is a dream. God—man—the world—the sun, the moon, the wilderness of stars—a dream, all a dream; they have no existence. Nothing exists save empty space—and you…. And you are not you—you have no body, no blood, no bones, you are but a thought. MARK TWAIN”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“What if our worldline is just one of an infinite number of worldlines, some only slightly altered from the life we know, others drastically different? The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that all possible realities exist. That everything which has a probability of happening is happening. Everything that might have occurred in our past did occur, only in another universe. What if that’s true? What if we live in a fifth-dimensional probability space? What if we actually inhabit the multiverse, but our brains have evolved in such a way as to equip us with a firewall that limits what we perceive to a single universe? One worldline. The one we choose, moment to moment. It makes sense if you think about it. We couldn’t possibly contend with simultaneously observing all possible realities at once. So how do we access this 5-D probability space? And if we could, where would it take us?”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“You really believe time is an illusion?” “More like our perception of it is so flawed that it may as well be an illusion. Every moment is equally real and happening now, but the nature of our consciousness only gives us access to one slice at a time. Think of our life like a book. Each page a distinct moment. But in the same way we read a book, we can only perceive one moment, one page, at a time. Our flawed perception shuts off access to all the others. Until now.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols

“In a way, you are poetry material; You are full of cloudy subtleties I am willing to spend a lifetime figuring out. Words burst in your essence and you carry their dust in the pores of your ethereal individuality.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“You are so vulnerably haunting; Your eeriness is terrifyingly irresistible.”
― Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

“Because memory…is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together—a symphony of neural activity. But in actuality, it’s the filter between us and reality. You think you’re tasting this wine, hearing the words I’m saying, in the present, but there’s no such thing. The neural impulses from your taste buds and your ears get transmitted to your brain, which processes them and dumps them into working memory—so by the time you know you’re experiencing something, it’s already in the past. Already a memory.” Helena leans forward, snaps her fingers. “Just what your brain does to interpret a simple stimulus like that is incredible. The visual and auditory information arrive at your eyes and ears at different speeds, and then are processed by your brain at different speeds. Your brain waits for the slowest bit of stimulus to be processed, then reorders the neural inputs correctly, and lets you experience them together, as a simultaneous event—about half a second after what actually happened. We think we’re perceiving the world directly and immediately, but everything we experience is this carefully edited, tape-delayed reconstruction.”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. Sylvia Plath”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Nora had read about multiverses and knew a bit about Gestalt psychology. About how human brains take complex information about the world and simplify it, so that when a human looks at a tree it translates the intricately complex mass of leaves and branches into this thing called ‘tree’. To be a human was to continually dumb the world down into an understandable story that keeps things simple.
She knew that everything humans see is a simplification. A human sees the world in three dimensions. That is a simplification. Humans are fundamentally limited, generalising creatures, living on auto-pilot, who straighten out curved streets in their minds, which explains why they get lost all the time.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“He said that in quantum physics every alternative possibility happens simultaneously. All at once. In the same place. The cat in the box is both alive and dead. You could open the box and see that it was alive or dead, that's how it goes, but in one sense, even after the box is open, the cat is still both alive and dead. Every universe exists over every other universe. Like a million pictures on tracing paper, all with slight variations within the same frame. The many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics suggests that there are an infinite number of divergent parallel universes. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe. With every decision you make.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“in the cosmic order of things. There is no rejection, there is only redirection.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You did the right thing, in the cosmic order of things. There is no rejection, there is only redirection. You know, I’ve been thinking a lot. About the cosmos. I’ve been tuning in. And the cosmos has been telling me I need to get my shit together. It’s balance, man. What we had was too intense and our lives are too intense and it’s like Darwin’s third law of motion. About an action leading to a reaction. Something had to give. And you were the one who saw that and now we are just particles floating in the universe that may reconnect one day at the Chateau Marmont”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“You can have everything and feel nothing.”
― Matt Haig, The Midnight Library

“Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I suffer from life and from other people. I can’t look at reality face to face. Even the sun discourages and depresses me. Only at night and all alone, withdrawn, forgotten and lost, with no connection to anything real or useful — only then do I find myself and feel comforted.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“I've never done anything but dream. This, and this alone, has been the meaning of my life. My only real concern has been my inner life.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“We never love anyone. What we love is the idea we have of someone. It's our own concept—our own selves—that we love.”
― Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

“When a person dies, he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past…All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever. —KURT VONNEGUT, SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past. —GEORGE ORWELL, 1984”
― Blake Crouch, Recursion

“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.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“We are all living, at most, half of a life, she thought. There was the life you lived, which consisted of the choices you made. And then, there was the other life, the one that was the things you hadn't chosen.”
― Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”
― Donna Tartt, The Secret History