Status Updates From The Years of Rice and Salt

pls let it be over soon

i truly don’t understand how KSR has managed to make yet another interesting topic this boring

It takes courage to keep love at the center when you know just as well as anyone else the real state of things! It's easy to get angry, anyone can do that. It's making good that's the hard part, it's staying hopeful that's the hard part! It's staying in love that's the hard part.

“God is a mathematician. A very great and subtle mathematician. As our bodies are to the crude furnaces and stills of your compound, so God's mathematics is to our mathematics.”

“You see,” he said, “it was the force of the air, or rather the pull of the void, that kept the halves together so strongly.”
The khan got up to leave, and his retainers rose with him. It seemed he was almost falling asleep. “So?” he said. “I want to blow my enemies apart, not hold them together.”

“We'll be back someday,” he said to them. “Us, or people worse than us.”

“It was wonderful! I saw through time, I felt the touch of the eternal. We made a place where people could love the good. Little steps, life after life; and eventually we will be there for good, in the white light.”

'To his advisors, particularly the generals and the heads of the treasury, conquering Nippon did not seem even remotely possible.
The emperor, true to form, insisted that it be done.'

KSR eerily prescient (this book from 2003) about America's new golden age of imperialism.

“Sanctuary,” Bistami said. “That's what the Christians called a place of protection. Usually their churches, or else a royal court. Like some of the Sufi ribat in Persia. It's a good thing. The good people come to you when the law elsewhere becomes too harsh.”