Matt > Matt's Quotes

“People of outstanding abilities and strength of character are born at more or less regular intervals, so it’s only the matter of their selection that is uneven. Their presence or absence in a particular field of inquiry can perhaps be explained by the perspectives it opens up.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“Whether they liked it or not, human beings had to take cognizance of a neighbor that, though it was billions of miles away across the void and separated from us by entire light years, still lay in the path of their expansion, and was harder to grasp than the whole of the rest of the Universe.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“A human being, appearances to the contrary, doesn’t create his own purposes. These are imposed by the time he’s born into; he may serve them, he may rebel against them, but the object of his service or rebellion comes from the outside.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“Each of us is aware he’s a material being, subject to the laws of physiology and physics, and that the strength of all our emotions combined cannot counteract those laws; it can only hate them.”
― Stanisław Lem, Solaris

“We perceive our environment in three dimensions, but we don’t actually live in a 3-D world. 3-D is static. A snapshot. We have to add a fourth dimension to begin to describe the nature of our existence. The 4-D tesseract doesn’t add a spatial dimension. It adds a temporal one. It adds time, a stream of 3-D cubes, representing space as it moves along time’s arrow. This is best illustrated by looking up into the night sky at stars whose brilliance took fifty light-years to reach our eyes. Or five hundred. Or five billion. We’re not just looking into space, we’re looking back through time. Our path through this 4-D spacetime is our worldline (reality), beginning with our birth and ending with our death. Four coordinates (x, y, z, and t [time]) locate a point within the tesseract. And we think it stops there, but that’s only true if every outcome is inevitable, if free will is an illusion, and our worldline is solitary. 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

“It’s a troubling paradox—I have total control, but only to the extent I have control over myself. My emotions. My inner storm. The secret engines that drive me.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“There’s a theory in the field of aesthetics called the uncanny valley. It holds that when something looks almost like a human being—a mannequin or humanlike robot—it creates revulsion in the observer, because the appearance is so close to human, yet just off enough to evoke a feeling of uncanniness, of something that is both familiar and alien.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“if I spend my days under broken-down cars in a mechanic’s shop or drilling cavities instead of teaching physics to college students, am I still the same man at the most fundamental level? And what is that level? If you strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle, what are the core components that make me me?”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“I take so many moments with you for granted. I walk out the door to work, and I’m already thinking about my day, about the lecture I have to give, whatever, and I just…I had a moment of clarity getting on the train about how much I love you. How much you mean to me. Because you never know.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“He says, “Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse? I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice.” Daniela says, “Life doesn’t work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don’t cheat the system.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“I can’t help thinking that we’re more than the sum total of our choices, that all the paths we might have taken factor somehow into the math of our identity.”
― Blake Crouch, Dark Matter

“Yet for Glass the fort did not mark a finish line to cross with elation, but rather a starting line to cross with resolve. With new equipment and his increasingly healthy body, he now had advantages that he had lacked in the past six weeks. Still, his goal lay far away.”
― Michael Punke, The Revenant

“Missing entirely from Henry’s description had been any hint of the devout strength that flowed into Glass at the sight of the massive peaks.”
― Michael Punke, The Revenant

“His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential”
― Michael Punke, The Revenant

“The wind’s direction now seemed consistent enough to bet on the other side of the tree. It couldn’t be worse, but Glass doubted he could move without losing the fire. Could he start another fire from scratch? In the dark? With no tinder? He saw no choice but to try.”
― Michael Punke, The Revenant

“How do you escape something that comes from inside? The revenant, he knew, searched for him.”
― Michael Punke, The Revenant

“He stood there on the high rampart for a long time that night, listening to the Missouri and staring at the stars. He wondered at the source of the waters, of the mighty Big Horns whose tops he had seen but never touched. He wondered at the stars and the heavens, comforted by their vastness against his own small place in the world. Finally he climbed down from the ramparts and went inside, quickly finding the sleep that had eluded him before.”
― Michael Punke, The Revenant

“Jim climbed a short ladder to the palisade. He perched his elbows on the top of the wall, gazing toward the Big Horn Mountains. With his eyes he traced again a deep canyon that seemed to penetrate the mountain’s very core. Did it? He smiled at the infinite prospect of what might lay up the canyon, of what might lay on the mountaintops, of what might lay beyond. He raised his eyes to a horizon carved from snowy mountain peaks, virgin white against the frigid blue sky. He could climb up there if he wanted. Climb up there and touch the horizon, jump across and find the next.”
― Michael Punke, The Revenant

“The evening proceeded as all evenings did in the family unit, in the dwelling, in the community: quiet, reflective, a time for renewal and preparation for the day to come.”
― Lois Lowry, The Giver

“I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved. Nobody was paying any attention to me up there. I should have known better. It was Terry who brought my soul back; on the tent stove she warmed up the food, and it was one of the greatest meals of my life, I was so hungry and tired. Sighing like an old Negro cotton-picker, I reclined on the bed and smoked a cigarette. Dogs barked in the cool night. Rickey and Ponzo had given up calling”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I looked up at the dark sky and prayed to God for a better break in life and a better chance to do something for the little people I loved. Nobody was paying any attention to me up there. I should have known better.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“I like too many things and get all confused and hung-up running from one falling star to another till i drop. This is the night, what it does to you. I had nothing to offer anybody except my own confusion.”
― Jack Kerouac

“It was the myth of the rainy night.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Bull had a sentimental streak about the old days in America, especially 1910, when you could get morphine in a drugstore without prescription and Chinese smoked opium. in their evening windows and the country was wild and brawling and free, with abundance and any kind of freedom for everyone. His chief hate was Washington bureaucracy; second to that, liberals; then cops.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“He was a tall, gangly, shy satirist who mumbled to you with his head turned away and always said funny things.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“It was sad to see his tall figure receding in the dark as we drove away, just like the other figures in New York and New Orleans: they stand uncertainly underneath immense skies, and everything about them is drowned. Where go? what do? what for?—sleep. But this foolish gang was bending onward.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“And for just a moment I had reached the point of ecstasy that I always wanted to reach, which was the complete step across chronological time into timeless shadows, and wonderment in the bleakness of the mortal realm, and the sensation of death kicking at my heels to move on, with a phantom dogging its own heels, and myself hurrying to a plank where all the angels dove off and flew into the holy void of uncreated emptiness, the potent and inconceivable radiancies shining in bright Mind Essence, innumerable lotus-lands falling open in the magic mothswarm of heaven.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“the reason being the enormous loneliness that differs just a shade and cut hair as you move across the Mississippi.”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road

“Dean pointed out with a grimace of pain. “It’s not the kind of sweat we have, it’s oily and it’s always there because it’s always hot the year round and she knows nothing of non-sweat, she was born with sweat and dies with sweat.” The sweat on her little brow was heavy, sluggish; it didn’t run; it just stood there and gleamed like a fine olive oil. “What that must do to their souls! How different they must be”
― Jack Kerouac, On the Road