Mark

“I lowered my hands to try to save from disorder the arrangement of the tleaves and flowers; meanwhile, she was also dealing with the branches, leaning forward; and so it happened that at the very moment when one of my hands slipped in confusion between Madame Miyagi's kimono and her bare skin and found itself clasping a soft and warm breast, elongated in form, one of the lady's hands, from among the branches keiyaki [translator's note: in Europe called Caucasian elm], had reached my member and was holding it in a firm, frank grasp, drawing it from my garments as if she were performing the operation of stripping away leaves.”
― Italo Calvino

“...something ELSE set your body in motion, sent an executive summary - almost an afterthought - to the homunculus behind your eyes ...that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as The person, mistakes correlation for causality," ...and thinks He moved the finger”
― Peter Watts, Blindsight

“It was a splendid mind. For if thought is like the keyboard of a
piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in
twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had one by one,
firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached
Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q. Here, stopping
for one moment by the stone urn which held the geraniums, he saw, but now
far, far away, like children picking up shells, divinely innocent and
occupied with little trifles at their feet and somehow entirely
defenceless against a doom which he perceived, his wife and son, together,
in the window. They needed his protection; he gave it them. But after Q?
What comes next? After Q there are a number of letters the last of which
is scarcely visible to mortal eyes, but glimmers red in the distance. Z is
only reached once by one man in a generation. Still, if he could reach R
it would be something. Here at least was Q. He dug his heels in at Q. Q he
was sure of. Q he could demonstrate. If Q then is Q--R--. Here he knocked
his pipe out, with two or three resonant taps on the handle of the urn,
and proceeded. "Then R ..." He braced himself. He clenched himself.”
― Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" asked the Christian theologian Tertullian... Having received the revealed thruth via Christ, "we want no curious disputation." Well that was then. Today science is so powerful that theologians can't casually dismiss secular knowledge. For most... Athens and Jerusalem must be reconciled or Jerusalem will fall off the map. Philo's thoughtful answer is 'Logos')”
― Robert Wright, The Evolution of God