Quotes About Reality

There is no safety. There is only forgetfulness.

Consciousness itself is a flavor of madness, set against the thoughts of the green world.

People make reality. Hydroelectric dams. Undersea tunnels. Supersonic transport. Tough to stand against that." Watchman smiles, tired. "We don't make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won't be able to pay.

Our father knew more than any living person about the secret of time, except how to live in it. His time did not travel; it was a block of persisting nows.

That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

Then he woke up from the dream of humankind.

We made this! It's so beautiful. The word lay beyond the rest of the team's list of formal descriptors. It seemed to have a real referent; the new woman apparently meant something when she used it. Beauty might even have had some physical reality, some selective advantage conferred over the last billion or so years. But what formal rules the quality adhered to, what behaviors it meant to elicit, not even Spider Lim's body could begin to guess.

The massively parallel online experience will go on, faithful to the tyranny of the place it pretends to escape.

He can't remember when the Web wasn't here. That's the job of consciousness, to turn Now into Always, to mistake what is for what was meant to be.

I've been a man who happily confuses the agreed-on for the actual. A man who has never doubted that life has a meaningful future

And there's only the narrowest window of time in which to really see them, before these things that never were turn into things that have always been.

People mean to drag her violently back into what people mistakenly call the world.

Nothing will be the same. The spruces answer: Nothing has ever been the same. We're all doomed, the man thinks. We have always all been doomed. But things are different this time. Yes. You're here.

The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: The problem begins with that word world. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can't escape.

THE LAWS THAT GOVERN THE LIGHT FROM A FIREFLY in my backyard as I write these words tonight also govern the light emitted from an exploding star one billion light-years away. Place changes nothing. Nor does time. One set of fixed rules runs the game, in all times and places. That's as big a truth as we Earthlings have discovered, or ever will, in our brief run.

But he has made her happy in the only place where people really live, the few-second-wide window of Now.

She quoted from The Country of Surprise: "Even baseline normality has about it something hallucinatory.

Watchman smiles, tired. "We don't make reality. We just evade it. So far. By looting natural capital and hiding the costs. But the bill is coming, and we won't be able to pay.

But people have no idea what time is. They think it's a line, spinning out from three seconds behind them, then vanishing just as fast into the three seconds of fog just ahead. They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

world is an experiment in inventing validity, and conviction is its only proof.

He's reached the age when dead is the new normal.

couldn't imagine Robin toughening up enough to survive this Ponzi scheme of a planet.

The single best thing you can do for the world. It occurs to her: the problem begins with that word world. It means two such opposite things. The real one we cannot see. The invented one we can't escape. She lifts the glass and hears her father read out loud: Let me sing to you now, about how people turn into other things.

Teller told me that the fission bomb was all well and good and, essentially, was now a sure thing. In reality, the work had hardly begun. Teller likes to jump to conclusions. He said that what we really should think about was the possibility of igniting deuterium by a fission weapon—the hydrogen bomb.