Mike Blyth

“The characteristic feature of all ethics is to consider human life as a game that can be won or lost and to teach man the means of winning.”
― Simone de Beauvoir, The Ethics of Ambiguity

“Neither you nor I believe in miracles. If they happen, they happen. But believing in them, expecting them – that’s nothing more than wasting the time alloted to you.”
― Henning Mankell, Italian Shoes

“How quickly the years fall away and the passage of time ceases meaning. We have each a purpose: we are bred to it, engineered for it, or we are drawn to it out of some fathomless innate longing that we cannot explain. Some unlucky few must discover—or create—it on their own, but those are rarer in these days, when by the grace of the forebears we are manufactured to our place in the order of the world. We have our destinies. We race for them, fight for them, fulfill them. Or we fail them. Listen, Perceval. Do you hear your long immortal life stretched out before you, before the stars? I have so much to teach you, my dear. The young do not believe in endings. They do not believe in death. They do not believe in time. Everything takes forever to happen, and twenty years is a long time. Under those circumstances, the apocalypse can seem sexy. Death is a fetish, a taste of the edge. It is not real. And so the days are long, and though time holds us green and dying, we cannot yet feel the drag of our chains hauling us forward to the end. But the old, Perceval. The old have forgiven time. Whatever time you may have is too little. If you live a thousand years—as I nearly have, and you surely will—it does not matter. Unless you have given up, laid down your tools, and folded idle hands to wait, beloved, you will still be in the middle of something when you die. The world is a wheel, and we are all broken on it. And that is fine and just. For there is never any hurry, until there is no time.”
― Elizabeth Bear, Dust

“Then what do you believe now?” She laughed, and saw his responding gleam, and was grateful. “If I wake up convinced there’s no God,” she said, “I’ll find him by lunchtime. But if I go to bed and pray for the salvation of my soul, I’ll know I’ve got no soul to save by breakfast.”
― Sarah Perry, Enlightenment