Geometry for Ocelots Quotes

“The true horror of existence is not the certainty of death, nor the threat of hell, but the knowledge that we will likely go our entire lives as impossibly complex machines, walking about in an impossibly complex universe, and never truly discover what it was all for. I don’t know is brave. I’ll never know is heroic.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“Also: Never buy cheap socks. Dance when you can. You’ll know when you’re in love. If you have to check, you’re not.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“If I asked you in the midst of a tragedy, “Shall I end your suffering and make all well again?” you would answer, “Please do, I beg it.” If instead I asked you after the tragedy, “Are you glad you lived through it? Did you grow wiser from the experience?” you would answer, “Yes! Thank you for not stopping the thing prematurely.” Humans are not to be trusted.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“Is there a more opulent society imaginable than one that builds spaceships while its population starves?”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“He said silently and with infinite volume, Mind is only matter that knows it is matter. Matter is only mind that is yet to become mind.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“With quiet horror I knew then that the great transition in man’s history was not from illiteracy to literacy, nor from ground-bound to spacefaring, but that invisible, unremarked-of moment when the most dangerous threat to man’s existence ceased being nature, and became man himself.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“Urinating one morning he became transfixed with an intricate pattern on the plaster of the toilet and mangled the tip of his penis in his trouser zip.
Such is the path to enlightenment.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“Shyness is just narcissism for introverts. You’d do well to remember that.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“History has already happened. We can’t do a damn thing about it. But we can be better. God, we can be better. I believe, as I hope you do, in a time one day—a while from now, but still attainably close—when the curses of poverty, misery, and death will seem as pointlessly tragic and avoidable as scurvy.  There is a long way to go yet, but we can get there. We can fucking get there. And it will be an honour to get there with you, or at least continue the brave walk towards adulthood our ancestors began millennia ago. Good luck out there and much, much love. Here come the wild twenties. See you on the other side.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“The reaches of the current system may seem inescapable at the moment. Well so was the divine rite of kings not too long ago.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“is honest enough to admit that. I’m sorry if ignorance scares you. I’m sorry if you can’t stand the thought of dying before you’ve found the meta-yes. But that’s how this works, for now. And in the meantime, bookended by birth and death, riding about in bodies of carbon, loving, suffering, striving, for a short, short time, we get to be. If we’re forced to be in a mysterious universe, and that universe is mute on the subject of its own motivations for existing, I’ll still take living in honest ignorance over your metaphysical posturing any day. That’s real bravery. Not concocting blatantly contradictory stories to comfort oneself, not appealing to the vague transcendent every time you get your worldview in a twist. Ignorance. Brave, honest admission of one’s ignorance, and living with that ignorance in a kind, compassionate manner, treating each other well even if we know we eventually all go to dust and never happen again. We must try to be wise, to be good women, to be good men. The rite of adulthood is the admission”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“True liberation is through the recognition of one’s unopposable oppressors.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“Moderation or self-death,”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“The difference between a hero and a fool is nothing more than the bias of the biographer.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“Then what? Damn it, what works?” “Adulthood. Only the wisdom of adulthood. From my spyle friends I’ve heard there is evidence of millions of developing species in the cosmos, many dead, many yet to arise. Some are carbon-based, some are silicon-based, some are gaseous, others distributed across entire solar systems in vast networks of radio intelligence. But there is one thing, one singular pressure imposing upon on them all. Can they learn moderation before extincting themselves?”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“There it was then. I would build a scientific religion, a religious science. I would reinvigorate man’s interest in the stars via spirituality. By chapel and telescope I would show reality in its nakedness, and convince the people of the Myriad of Man that we are but universe experiencing itself. At last we would look into the mirror of Being, and see only Universe looking back. “We would find wonder in the imponderable majesty of the little, in all of the cells and molecules and atoms and quarks inside one’s body, the beauty of it, the absurdity. That is where we would apprehend the transcendent. And in finding that transcendent, we would at last realise we are but matter, and finally seek to stop conquering more matter. The way out was not up, to some holy, blazing firmament, but down, into the skin, into the quiet absurdity of being.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“Power is fine. Restraint is better. Technology saves some. Compassion saves all.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“Within a few minutes the gin and beer took hold. Leo’s head became full of warm marmalade and the usual neurotic mental noise had dimmed to a mutter. So this is what the drunks are after, he thought.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“The principal aim of the species will be to build a single great mirror which all will look into, and see only universe looking back.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“We don’t seem to dream of a better world much anymore. We were burned so many times by utopian thinking last century that even utopia is a dirty word now. But we must, must, must start dreaming again, dreaming wide and big of a society where no one is trodden on and everyone can eat. Our dignity relies on it. Our descendants will rely on it. Don’t listen to these miserable, jaded fucks who insist that the indignities and inequalities of the current world are just necessary evils. These same bastards would’ve tried to keep feudalism around not a half-millennium ago.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“Be kind, and when you can’t be kind, be fair. And when you can’t be fair, be clever. And when you can’t be clever, please be kind again.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“It seemed to him suddenly that self-hate was the result of a misguided attempt to please people one would never meet, and if one did meet such judgemental idiots, one would not respect them nor desire their respect in the first place.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“Science did not kill magic. Yes, we've had to dispense with spells and incantations. Yes, the universe is more apathetic than previously supposed. But in return for accepting these losses, we have gained a picture of the world so unfathomably beautiful and mysterious that if God truly existed, He Himself could not fathom it.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“So, whatever happens next, allow yourself to be warmed, if only for a minute, by the knowledge that not even the gods know what dirt is doing here.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“For just a moment she had seen emotion and sensation for what they were: no more than dirt one could effortlessly brush off from the lantern of pure awareness.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“His tears had wrecked the text, but he knew the spoiled words from memory.

Little Leo,

We’re going to live on two sides of things now, I in the dark and you, my love, I hope, in the forever light. There are a thousand things I’d like to tell you, but two are far more important than the rest. First, don’t shy away from taking the stage, however bright the lights. The people of Gearheart will channel all their hopes for the future into you. They are tired of the ever-turning wheel of power. They are tired of the Devan Union’s apathy, tired of Anaximander’s promises that never materialised. And, I should imagine, they are already especially tired of Hisarya. They will embrace you as a kind dean, and you will be a kind dean. And, I believe, truly I do, that you will be the one to stop bivnik. Also: Never buy cheap socks. Dance when you can. You’ll know when you’re in love. If you have to check, you’re not. Well then, that’s the secret to ruling well. You’ll work the rest out as you go. To the second matter. If I had dominion over all the atoms of all the worlds, I wouldn’t go back and change the course of one, not by the slightest deviation, because you might not have been my son. And better all history’s indignities stay unchanged and you remain my son than the other way around. There will be years ahead now when you’ll think you’re lost and nothing can possibly recover you. You’ll want for your mother and you’ll know you can never talk to her again. You might rule ten thousand worlds by then, but I bet you’d trade it all for one more hug with me. And I’d give anything, anything in the galaxy, to live a little longer and watch you turn into the man you’re about to. But that is not how things have gone. Each life contains a few days of unimaginable fear and despair. You will think nothing can pull you out and back onto solid land. You’ll be wrong though. You can, all by yourself. You have everything you need, right there in your clever head and bottomless heart. And even though we’ll go separate ways now, and I’m afraid my hugs are off-limits, I will be right there at your side. For as long as you remember me, I’ll attend your dark nights when your heart is broken and cheer from the cheap seats as your make your great ascendances. Then later, when your great-grandchildren have settled on distant worlds to raise their own little ones, and when those

little ones have grown old, when the stars have all winked out, when the whole galaxy has gone cold and everything has been snuffed to dust, there will still be two facts left behind in dead eternity: that I was your mother, and I loved you more than you can ever possibly understand. I’m with you always and always,

Mama”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“You will think nothing can pull you out and back onto solid land. You'll be wrong through. You can, all by yourself. You have everything you need, right there in your clever head and your bottomless heart.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“It is without question that we live inside a dream. I do not mean this world is illusory or submissive to one’s will. Rather, you will have noticed that when inside a dream, despite the contorted narrative, and the sudden return of friends long dead, and a crack in the sky—for as long as you are asleep, the logic holds. It is only upon waking that you realise there was no logic to the dream at all. The waking world is no different. Yes, we are familiar with the presentations of light and sound and time. Yes, we are aware that two objects cannot occupy the same space, that eleven is a prime number, and so on. But what is the logic beneath these presentations? What is so self-evident about light or sound or time? The answer is: nothing. The world is not comprehensible. It is only that we have been asleep so long its incomprehensibility has become familiar.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“The true horror of existence is not the certainty of death, nor the threat of hell, but the knowledge that we will likely go our entire lives as impossibly complex machines, walking about in an impossibly complex universe, and never truly discover what it was all for.”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots

“Bolstered by doomsday weapons and an internet that can no longer agree on a consensus narrative regarding just about anything, the 2020s may well be the defining decade of our species. As in, this could well be make-or-break time. And if you are being told again and again that humans have to starve to keep the machine going, that the current indignities are just a necessary quirk of the system, that we will only survive if we preserve the status quo, then I would like to leave you with a paraphrasing of something my hero Ursula K. Le Guin said in a speech shortly before she died:”
― Exurb1a, Geometry for Ocelots