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.

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.

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

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

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

Humans are the only animals that build zoos for themselves.

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

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.

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.

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.

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;

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Brilliant accidents on the way to oblivion

Moderation or self-death,

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

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

I don't mind living a brief life as a stupid animal when I get to see your face in the morning.

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.

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.

Funny, for all the elaborate worrying one can do, Constructing worst-case successes and best-case disasters, Playing chess against one's future self and imagining we can win when we're not even them yet

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Two weeks of false starts, of too much cloud cover, of strong wind, of last minute mechanical doubts.

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.

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.

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.

here 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

With no help from myself, he also declared that 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.

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

Adam laid in the dark for a long time, thinking and not thinking. Thinking in an indirect way in the fashion one knows the sun is there without having to look straight at the thing.

And in the way children want to skip all the years of hardship and just ingest their parents’ knowledge for free, he wanted to know what made her face so sad. But he also knew no amount of explaining would communicate the thing, just as no amount of explaining will convey calculus to a toddler.

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.

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

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.

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.

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:

It wasn’t the poor who revolted. It wasn’t the rich who overran everything. It was the fat, satisfied middle class, and their fat, satisfied kids. There was no revolution. There was only the promise that revolutions would never happen again and everyone could carve out a comfy little space for themselves and talk to their fridge and own a crystal communicator if they only turned a blind eye to the end of the world. The kids tried candy, and then candy was all they wanted.

There would be no reason or compassion without religion.” “Nonsense, sir,” Marta said. “I choose not to harm because I know what it is to be harmed, and I’d rather not inflict it on my kin or friends or society. I don’t have to be commanded to do so. I choose to. If I behaved well just because I’d been told to, with the threat of hell or what have you, that isn’t really good behaviour at all, but a celestial hostage situation.

Biological evolution wasn’t a pleasant prospect for the ancients to come around to. Many did everything they could to deny the evidence at first, but there it was—we came from dirt. In time, we incorporated those new and difficult findings into our worldviews, tempered our egos. Later we were better for it, much like a child eventually accepting the hard edges of the world so as not to injure herself so badly on the next occasion.” Mriga said, “Very noble, madam. Spoken like a true champion of reason. The only problem, of course, is that no one would choose to live under such a dark, abyssal narrative as yours. You have no answers, only vapid questions. What is the point of life? How best to live? Where do we go when we die? You only inject doubt where Bodhi has certainty. Tell me, where do you think the night sky came from, Dr Tereshkova? You have no explanation for why there’s anything here at all.” Marta groaned, “And neither do you in the slightest, the only difference being that Gearheart

of ignorance, not the proliferation of fabricated stories to assuage our existential fears.

Lord Mriga, we may be living in the last days of galactic civilisation. You can posture all you like and call the bivnik models wrong, or claim Anaximander will save us, or whatever suits you, but we won’t stand for it. The mark of a society’s stupidity is the degree to which it believes its own myths. But I’ll tell you what’s better than myths, better than narratives, better than turning ourselves into animals and walking through fourspace just to stave off the knowledge that we’ll still all go to ashes one day. Metaphysical maturity. The recognition that this is our galaxy, these are our stars, these are our citizens, and our children. The price of having these things is taking responsibility for them. If we keep peddling propaganda about our divine right to exploit resources in the name of some Great Above despite the obvious drawbacks of such behaviour, then all the suns will burn out long before we achieve even a scrap

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.

We should’ve taken all our canine teeth out before we ever left the motherworld. We should’ve cut our claws on the journey up through the atmosphere. The heavens weren’t ready for us, and now we’ve turned the place into a mortuary for the species

just like children you keep putting your hand in the fire to see if it's still hot. That approach has brought nothing but death and stupefaction and I wish you'd stop it.

History is a drunk magician however, and soon a strange thing came to pass.