Exurb1a Quotes

No one is guaranteed happiness. It's not a human right. It's a house you have to build yourself. Your family and friends can help, but they're all busy building their own houses too. You're just bitter because you built a shit house.

Hell isn't a fire pit but a museum of regrets.

It's funny, you don't convince the living to behave in a proper way; you just wait for them to die and hope their children grow up a little kinder and wiser than their parents.

In the beginning there was Nothing but Nothing is unstable so Something came about.

What a lovely thing utopia is when you were too young to remember the horror that came with it.

I fear that on my last day, on my deathbed, that is when the meaning of things will enter the room and kiss my forehead and whisper into my ear what it was I should have done with my life, and how I should've conducted myself. Hell isn't a fire pit but a museum of regrets.

Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they’ll never sit in.

There's no grand plan and no one's in charge. It's all just fumbling about in the dark, and half the time you're not even sure why you're fumbling. You're so desperate for something to pin your peace of mind to that you'll do all sorts of stupid things in its name. You don't mean to break up a marriage, but if breaking it up might let you sleep like a normal person again, suddenly you start considering it. You don't mean to become a drunk, but if drink is the only way you can keep a handle on some tiny compartment of your life then it's straight for the bottle.

Happy people are just people you aren't acquainted enough with yet to know how miserable they really are.

Don't be so foolish to believe empires are built on stone. They're on bamboo stilts at best.

If I was in hell, would I know?

There is evil in the world, yet God claims he loves us. If he could remove that evil but chooses not to, then he is not all-loving as we're told he is. If he wants to remove that evil from the world but cannot, then why do we call him all-powerful? In any case, he's not truly God and there's nothing to be frightened of. Chin up.” “Goodnight

Most humans were not malicious, only drastically misguided and desperate in their loneliness. They learned at some point that there was an eccentric core to their personality and that it was possible no one else shared their own brand of eccentricity. They put up screens around that core to shield from embarrassment and shame. For all the pompous forms in which writers and musicians have described it, love was surely that moment when the screens might come down in front of another human, if only for a moment, and freely give them a long, unfettered look into the true middle where the fear and anguish lives.

However we feel about this, Arcadia was built with pure autonomy in mind. Autonomy is only true autonomy when you allow others to go in directions you don’t condone. All else is just ethical masturbation.

Until that hungry black god eats me up. Now I spend the centuries circling into it like a penny in one of those coin spirals at an arcade;

If philosophers gave clear answers then surely the whole field would've died out with the Greeks.

Inaction is the primary refuge of those who prefer their own constructed realities to the beautiful chaos of the real world.

With the right ears even a lesser creature can hear the song. It is sung constantly, from the heart of each atom and star. The galaxies hum of shape and form in their essence. That is their secret. The particles whisper of the nature of proper interactions. That is their game. And during a storm, in the forest, on the right night, it is no secret that the leaves all sing of God.

In all things, across all avenues, a choice must be made: whether to follow love, truth, or power. That choice will consume the chooser. If he follows only love then his wellbeing will be constantly at the mercy of another, though his highs will be sublime. If he follows truth then it will be a lonely journey, but potentially a noble one. If he should follow power though, not only will he come to know a desperate and revolting loneliness, but he will also never experience even a drop of satisfaction in anything

There is a kind of bravery to our condition, I reckon: brought into being without an explanation, in a potentially infinite and apparently dead universe, and expected to just get on with it as though nothing strange is going on. Well it fucking is. And it's all right to have a meltdown about the whole affair from time to time, faced with the pressures of modern existence, trying to be a good human and a good worker and a good son/daughter/parent, trying to be a good citizen, trying to be wise without condescension but uninhibited without recklessness, trying to just muddle through without making any silly decisions, trying to align with the correct political opinions, trying to stay thin, trying to be attractive, trying to be smart, trying to find the ideal partner, trying to stay financially secure, trying to just find some modest corner of meaning and belonging and sanity to go and sit in, and all the while living on the edge of dying forever.

One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. — Carl Jung

Let them be brave, the old man thought, a prayer to no one in particular – whoever they are, my great grandchildren – let them be brave so they might look back upon this planet from a distant star one day and have forged their own, better place. Let them be brave so they might choose Compassion over Stupidity each and every time. Let their genes hum with the Insatiable Need to Know That Which They Don't Know Yet. God, let them be better than us at the very least.

self-consciousness was the product of a positive feedback loop between perception and reflection, the two eventually amplifying each other into a cycle that occurred so quickly neither could be separated from the other.

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.

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.

But if you think about it long enough, you'll always come around to the same conclusion, I reckon. There's no grand plan and no one's in charge.

Live out the rest of your life in a constant and quietly sad state of What If? Inaction is the primary refuge of those who prefer their own constructed realities to the beautiful chaos of the real world.

You're just selfish,” she says. “Go fuck yourself,” he says quietly. “You said you'd be nice.” “I'm not selfish.” “Sure you are. You love everything for as long as it's easy then as soon as you have to actually empathise with another human being you get claustrophobic.

That which is abandoned in the name of efficiency was often an essential part after all.

True liberation is through the recognition of one’s unopposable oppressors.

There’s nothing magic about a grenade, but you still don’t pull the pin out.

Is there a more opulent society imaginable than one that builds spaceships while its population starves?

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.

Save a drowning fool and he'll only be back in the river the next day. And what then?” The boy lowers his voice to its true pitch; deep and echoing all of a sudden. “Leave him to drown and you're no better than a murderer.

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.

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.

We call it ‘narrative collapse’. When a planet is very connected, a time inevitably arrives when it becomes difficult to work out what is actually going on. Video and audio can be faked. Testimony isn’t reliable. All truths fall into a relative flatness. This is more dangerous than any doomsday weapon. You

The universe was alive with staccato radio chatter and art and curiosity and wonder and change.

Happy people are just miserable people you don't know well enough,

You wouldn't understand. Oh shut up, I loved just as well as you in my early years. But to court a married woman, that takes a certain shade of stupidity.

Go home, Tao. Don’t try to be a hero, or a sage, or a warrior. Just exist for a while and be decent. That’s heroism enough.

Power is fine. Restraint is better. Technology saves some. Compassion saves all.

People who spend all their time taking photos will just remember taking photos. Souvenirs only make you think of buying them, don’t they.

In the face of an intangible problem, ignorance is generally the safest option.

Beauty is nice and virtue is attractive, but nothing is more gorgeous than meeting another creature who shares your deepest values.

Humans are the only animals that build zoos for themselves.

I don't have to go to therapy anymore. I got off the coke-

Shyness is just narcissism for introverts. You’d do well to remember that.

Consciousness is a pattern, he mused. An ocean of sorts.

If buying new socks or doing the washing up he found it amazing that she, a creature so gorgeous and perfect, would undertake tasks just as mundane in her daily life—as though realising Jesus pissed

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.

It's fun to think that one day our great, great grandchildren may get that much closer to understanding what the hell creation is doing here in the first place, and glimpsing the underlying structure and nature of matter itself. Hopefully they won't live with the same existential horrors we all quietly face today in our own lives.    There is a kind of bravery to our condition, I reckon: brought into being without an explanation, in a potentially infinite and apparently dead universe, and expected to just get on with it as though nothing strange is going on. Well it fucking is. And it's all right to have a meltdown about the whole affair from time to time, faced with the pressures of modern existence, trying to be a good human and a good worker and a good son/daughter/parent, trying to be a good citizen, trying to be wise without condescension but uninhibited without recklessness, trying to just muddle through without making any silly decisions, trying to align with the correct political opinions, trying to stay thin, trying to be attractive, trying to be smart, trying to find the ideal partner, trying to stay financially secure, trying to just find some modest corner of meaning and belonging and sanity to go and sit in, and all the while living on the edge of dying forever.    We're all in the same strange boat, grappling with the same strange condition. But it isn't quite so scary if we all do it together. So let's do it together.

love was surely that moment when the screens might come down in front of another human, if only for a moment, and freely give them a long, unfettered look into the true middle where the fear and anguish lives.

Just like a hotel, it's a place to sleep and be, only you don't sleep that much and you're barely a thing at all anymore. You keep the place bare like this because there's nothing left on the inside to express.

As far as I’m aware there has never been a point in history when a village, a society, or a planet has come together for a day and said, “What is it we’re all going after?” There has never been a vote about our collective purpose.

One would strain to tell the difference between insanity and a mere annoyance, depending on the context. If a fellow had been wronged enough, perhaps he would take on the appearance of a man insane, but he is only insane with rage.

Where there are tyrants, we’ll bring death. Where there are no tyrants, we'll call them tyrants and we’ll bring death. Where there is anarchy, we’ll bring laws. Where there is no anarchy, we’ll call it anarchy and we'll bring laws.

This was matter’s most honest state in any case; superposition, quantum tunnelling, entanglement, cleavance, wormhole fracture; all of the strange furniture of quantum mechanics appeared to be the universe’s true face. All else was matter trying to seem sober, putting on laws for show.

There is evil in the world, yet God claims he loves us. If he could remove that evil but chooses not to, then he is not all-loving as we're told he is. If he wants to remove that evil from the world but cannot, then why do we call him all-powerful? In any case, he's not truly God and there's nothing to be frightened of. Chin up.

Look, here.” It was a mound and inside the mound were black insects, popping out of the mound then crawling back in. Some were skirting the surrounding dirt, bringing back sticks and pebbles. “They're called mitwicks. Do you like them?” “I thought you'd found something,” Ushko muttered. “I have. Look at them. Do you know what they do?” “No.” “They live for about four hundred days. They choose a queen. She doesn't have babies, but she can give orders. She orders them all about to pick things up and bring them back. They build a mound together and inside they fill it with the best sticks and pebbles they can find. And when it's perfect, when they've built the perfect home and everything's just right, do you know what they do?” “No.” “They die.

Whatever happens, however clever we eventually become, there will be an end to our trials and projects. Whether we’re superseded by our creations or just put to sleep by exhaustion, the end of history will approach eventually. When that occurs, all the statues and books and paintings in the world won’t save our legacy. Better then that we just enjoy the time we have, living in a wonderful age like the one we find ourselves in now.

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?

It is safe to say that the message spoke of a common shape to all the processes of the world, and insisted there was a unity to all explanations. It confirmed that all phenomena are expressions of a single phenomenon, and while all droplets consider themselves independent, they are nonetheless still ocean through and through. In that message the great suspicions were vindicated and the old cliches were jettisoned. The hymn of the world was notated and an invitation to join the choir extended. The shape of Being was outlined in all its myriad forms and the whole was expressed in the part. With the right ears even a lesser creature can hear the song. It is sung constantly, from the heart of each atom and star. The galaxies hum of shape and form in their essence. That is their secret. The particles whisper of the nature of proper interactions. That is their game. And during a storm, in the forest, on the right night, it is no secret that the leaves all sing of God.

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.

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.

Distance appears to only apply when the universe knows She is being watched.

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.

We started with trying to understand the mechanics of the heavens. We concluded with pleasure cruises and little plastic drinking straws. What had gone wrong? How had we learned to unhear the cosmic music? It was all fact without wonder.

It's one thing to get called into creation without being asked first, But it's an insult to injury to then be expected on top of that to work out what the hell you're doing here in the first (second) place

A statue waited before them, a sapien male made entirely of glass, the height of ten market stalls. “The Glass King,” Kaluza whispered. “You read about him?” “A little.” “The Glass King built Arcadia, understand? The world was made, not formed. Thousands of years ago, by the sapien metric.” “Why?” “Why what?” “Why did he build Arcadia?” “Because sapiens broke easily, and even if they stayed careful they still wore down and died. Not so deep into their history they’d peered into physics and wrapped the universe up in equations and built huge societies, and they still hadn’t done a thing about death. The Glass King vowed to kill it.” “To kill death?” “To kill death.

We're accidents?” “Everyone is anyway.

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.

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.

Moderation or self-death,

A dog might present you with some of his finest poops, but I doubt you'd award him the Pulitzer.

There is a special problem in communications theory. We call it ‘narrative collapse’. When a planet is very connected, a time inevitably arrives when it becomes difficult to work out what is actually going on. Video and audio can be faked. Testimony isn’t reliable. All truths fall into a relative flatness. This is more dangerous than any doomsday weapon. You have a king and, if you don’t mind me saying so, not a very nice one. But at least his population knows when he’s being deceitful or harsh. On my world and the sister world we’ve lost even that. Many still don’t even believe Morae really exists. They claim it’s a fabrication by Al’Hazaad.

Brilliant accidents on the way to oblivion

There is nothing worse than to remain sober around those who are drinking. Their euphoria intensifies, while you only grow quietly embarrassed for them. At some point during the evening they will intuit you are judging their follies and become self-conscious. They will despise you for depriving them of the bliss of drunken excess by virtue of your watching. The reaction is much the same from the gluttonous, rich, and powerful when one reminds them that the resources of the environment are not infinite. They might continue to plunder, but they will hate you for bringing conscience into their debauchery, for turning the light on during the orgy. Why, the house was burning down, but we were so enjoying the glow. . . - Excerpts from The Empirical Sutras of Lady Ursula

I am only wise to the infinite scope of my ignorance

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.

There is nothing obvious about the picture of the world we have obtained using the scientific method. Molecules, quarks, atoms, billions of stars and galaxies, meat that knows it’s sentient—what is this madness? And, of course, one might ask: is the scientific model of reality not just another kind of magic, another absurd, fanciful delusion? The answer is: yes. However, it also happens to be the only delusion that doesn’t go away when one stops believing in it.

There is nothing worse than to remain sober around those who are drinking. Their euphoria intensifies, while you only grow quietly embarrassed for them. At some point during the evening they will intuit you are judging their follies and become self-conscious. They will despise you for depriving them of the bliss of drunken excess by virtue of your watching. The reaction is much the same from the gluttonous, rich, and powerful when one reminds them that the resources of the environment are not infinite. They might continue to plunder, but they will hate you for bringing conscience into their debauchery, for turning the light on during the orgy.

As far as I’m aware there has never been a point in history when a village, a society, or a planet has come together for a day and said, “What is it we’re all going after?” There has never been a vote about our collective purpose. Either a whole society is subject to the dictates of one mad ruler who imposes their vision on the whole, or the society is self-driven and strives after its own ends individually, among the whole. Why is there never an objective?

The answer is perhaps the same for us here at the end of history as it was for our ancestors millions of years ago at the beginning: to live well, to live quietly, and to die without too much of a fuss. And if we are very, very lucky, to love properly at least once.

Man is a two-thing animal, they said; part beast, part deity. He wants to kill. He wants to know. He should suppress the first and encourage the second. One day we’ll learn to take the beast out entirely and pop it in a little bell jar. There’ll be no violence then.

the realms above space require even more extraordinary technologies. Hisarya murmured, What technologies? Wisdom, the entity said in sad cyan. Self-control. Maturity. The survival of what you call bivnik. The true game of empire is not the subjugation of worlds so they might be collected in a little museum of power, but the cultivation of the wisdom to delay gratification.

The struggle of history is not to determine more efficiently which of our stories are fiction, and which are correct interpretations of reality, but to cease telling stories entirely. - Excerpts from The Metaphysical Sutras of Lord Anaximander

They ran from world to world, struggling for millennia. In desperation they tried to revert to the old styles of life, became agrarian again, subsistence farming and such, attempting to moderate themselves. But it was too late of course. Once a child has tried chocolate, who could convince him fruit is better? The last of their galactic reserves dwindled, and all that remained was savagery and death.

Dr Tereshkov, stopping bivnik is not a technology problem. It is not a sociological problem. It is a wisdom problem. And wisdom problems do not respond to data, or beatings, or mathematical formalism.

It is my suspicion that the galaxies are drastically distant from one another so they can only be traversed by beings who have already overcome bivnik—by species able to contain their lust for cosmic abasement long enough to resist writing their names on the stars and selling nebulae for advertising space—a kind of evolutionary selection pressure, if you will. Those species that give in to avarice and limitless expansion are doomed to extinction long before gaining the means to leave their galaxy or transcend to the higher-dimensional realms.

You have proof of this?” Leo said. “Yes. There is a plane above Vex that I have glimpsed only once. There are creatures of some kind who inhabit it, unknowable, unfathomable beings. I believe they are the descendants of those few civilisations who learned that dessert need not be eaten after every meal, that on some evenings only one glass of wine is ample, and that a palace may sleep not just a king, but ten thousand

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.

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. - Excerpts from The Metaphysical Sutras of Lord Anaximander

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.

Quieter: “I choose to believe even those enigmatic higher-dimensional creatures I spied, even the beings above them, have not seen Nature’s true face—even they are no closer than us to understanding what reality is doing here, else they would have descended to tell the Truth in a manner we might understand, and no one would die ignorant ever again. 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.

The world may be a story, but the plot delivers no catharsis, and the moral the story is trying to get across is far from obvious.

I think we like telling stories because for as long as we listen to them, we can forget that the world is harsh and unpredictable, and that history is driving heavily, heavily under the influence. And maybe it’s trying to drive somewhere with good intentions, but more often than not, falls asleep and swerves into an orphanage. Our respective nation’s histories are no different. Our personal histories are no different. But

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:

The reaches of the current system may seem inescapable at the moment. Well so was the divine rite of kings not too long ago.