Murmur Quotes

“Pain is memory with witness or corroboration. It isn't real to anyone else, and that is what allows torturers, including governments, to be torturers. They can pretend it isn't happening because it isn't happening to them.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“We agree not to look. It is a simple but profound contract of the collective subconscious with the truth. If you speak the truth, or do something which indicates how human beings function, regardless of the law, regardless of moral superstition, then people will turn against you, and you must never underestimate how fearful and weak most people in a large body, like a government, or a university, or even an office, actually are. Once you have been isolated in this way, you can be dismissed.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“It is not hatred that turns the majority against the minority, but intuitive shame.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“Tolstoy’s accounts of Borodino and Austerlitz show us what real war is like: no one knows what the orders are or who is winning. No one has any idea what to do. Soldiers are permitted to kill each other and are maddened, sooner or later, by the realization that someone else, somewhere relatively comfortable, thinks this is the right thing for them to do. And we are not so far from that kind of chaos in everyday life, really. I walk down the street towards the Infirmary, every Wednesday, and I go in and wait and sit down and everyone is quite polite, and I am played with by the law and turned into a sexless person. The most extraordinary thing is done behind a nice white screen. And the nurse who injects me does it with a good will, because she has been told that it is her job. She doubtless thinks of herself as a freely choosing agent. She likes to think she does her job well, but at the same time she is just doing her job. (One hears this a lot.) That means she does not take ultimate responsibility for her actions, because those kinds of decisions are taken, or absorbed, by more powerful persons, like Tolstoy’s generals, who know what they are doing. She sees no contradiction between this and her own intuitive sense of agency.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“That means she does not take ultimate responsibility for her actions, because those kinds of decisions are taken, or absorbed, by more powerful persons, like Tolstoy’s generals, who know what they are doing.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“Tolstoy’s accounts of Borodino and Austerlitz show us what real war is like: no one knows what the orders are or who is winning. No one has any idea what to do. Soldiers are permitted to kill each other and are maddened, sooner or later, by the realisation that someone else, somewhere relatively comfortable, thinks this is the right thing for them to do. And we are not so far from that kind of chaos in everyday life, really.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“The observer is a participant, as the great revolution in quantum physics has taught us.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“Freaks live in pain, as do most sporting types and ballet dancers. So much of real life is invisible.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“Pain is the invisible companion.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“If only we could believe we were just carbon and water, we could leave life behind very phlegmatically, but belief gets in the way.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“Time is the plane that reveals this interlocking, though time is not discrete. You cannot pin it down. Very often you cannot see the point at which things start to come together, the point at which cause generates effect, and this is a variant of the measurement problem.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“[His notes] may well proceed from a psychoanalytic theory. But how is the theory being tested or controlled? How can it be said to be scientific?”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“A sibling in full spate is always frightening, their anger a surprising powerful defense, their deeper impotence equally powerful, absurd.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur

“Fear of homosexuals is never far from the surface.”
― Will Eaves, Murmur