Katabasis Rf Kuang Quotes

This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional.

How wonderful, truly, to have a friend whose silence you adored.

She gazed at Peter and thought, 'I wish I were the night, so that I might watch your sleep with a thousand eyes.

And if falling in love was discovery, was letting yourself be discovered the equivalent to being loved?

Christ,” said Peter. “Hell is a campus.

Her memory did that sometimes; she confused memories and reality, her imagination was too vivid, she couldn’t help it.

Those who had nothing substantial to brag about bragged the loudest.

Fortunately graduate school had prepared her for this, the constant managing of despair.

I feel sometimes it is so difficult to be conscious.

What Alice needed most then was a nice long holiday, and then perhaps institutionalization at some remote facility near the sea.

Now all that was gone. This was the unbelievable fact of death. This was a paradox her mind could not accept, that someone could be in the world one moment and simply be gone the next.

Surely no one else lived like this - burdened by the tiniest details they assumed had enormous consequences. Surely no one else was so anchored by anxiety. Other people could stumble and shake their heads and move on. How she envied their lightness.

Meteorologically, Hell didn’t seem much worse than an English spring.

Hell’s lonely,” said Peter. “You’ll want company.” “Hell is other people, I’ve heard.

Being an idiot!” All four Shades shuddered; a quivering mass of jelly. “Oh, the horror! Oh, to not be clever!” And one of them wailed, “What if you never learn to read!

What you must realize, Alice, is that you cannot just take refuge in feminism when it suits you.

Everyone knew that the nicer a library was, the better the work you did within it.

You’ve got that look about you.” “What look?” “Well, not to be rude, but you’re all fucked up, aren’t you?

She thought she’d learned to inhabit the impossible ideal: the girl who was eminently fuckable but unreachable, and therefore virtuous and perfect. The girl who was everything all at once.

Perhaps human intelligence was a mistake, and everyone who celebrated the escape from the Garden of Eden was wrong. Perhaps the gift of rationality did not outweigh the debilitating agony that came with it.

She was not alone. She was safe. There was at least a single other soul in this universe who vibrated at her same frequency.

And so perhaps it was entirely possible - common, even - for you to look into the eyes of someone you'd been falling in love with, someone you had spent every waking moment with, whose breathing sounded as familiar as your own - and fail to recognize them at all.

But of course it was worth it. It was the only thing that was worth it. She had been fortunate to find a vocation that made irrelevant everything else, and anything that made you forget to eat, drink, sleep, or maintain basic relationships—anything that made you so inhumanly excited—had to be pursued with single-minded devotion.

Believe the lie - trust the lie - it is the only thing you have. Stay in the cage and paint the walls. If you do not, then you must quit; but if you can delude yourself long enough, then your delusions might very well come true.

She was of course underpaid and overworked, but this condition was common among graduate students and no one cared much about it.

Good jobs were vanishingly rare in academia. Alice very much wanted one. She wouldn't know what to do with herself otherwise. She had trained her entire life to do this one thing, and if she could not do it, then she had no reason to live.

Sometimes I am very clever but most of the time I am not. I have been a good person sometimes, and a bad person at others. Sooner or later I will die. But before I do, I will try—I will try very hard—to make it count.

academia respected discipline, rewarded effort, but even more, it adored genius that didn’t have to try.

I wish I were the night, so that I might watch your sleep with a thousand eyes.

Crying fits are to be conducted in private, that’s library rules.

The world is not a complete system; there is always an exception. No explanation for its existence; no reason why one might expect it to have existed before or to ever exist again. The world was simply unknowable; exceptions cropped up all the time, and all you had to do to beat the odds was just look.

And over there—creative writing students.

All the ghost stories were wrong; hauntings were so rarely malicious. The dead only wanted to feel included.

All the stories were wrong - no siren's call was as alluring as the sea itself, and the quiet dark beyond the shore.

You might say karma is like a seed. Seeds grow into fruit. Karma is a natural consequence. Badness accrues. It affects the way you live your life, how you perceive the world. When you do evil things, you see the world as petty and selfish and cruel. And what you experience in Hell is just the final ripple effect of your original evil. You get precisely what you asked for. And I think the whole point of Hell is to show you the full extent of what you wanted.

Oh, he took a job in industry,” they would say, as if “industry” here was a euphemism like a farm for old sick dogs. And they said it with a kind, patronizing lilt that betrayed what they truly meant: alt academia meant failure. The life of the mind, unfettered from commerce, was the only kind worth living.

The life of the mind, unfettered from commerce, was the only kind worth living.

That one likes to remind folks that Dartmouth is in the Ivy League.

A weak body was just the same as a weak mind; either might afflict you, and both disqualified you from genius.

Loss of identity was a terrifying prospect.

All her life, it seemed, she had run headfirst in precisely the wrong directions. It was not for lack of opportunity. She knew very well where the sun shone, and yet was bound by impulse to bury herself in the dark.

This was love, a love she had never known; At last, she thought, this is the real thing -- this gradual unfolding of another soul, charting one's course into priviliged inner territory, making discoveries of which you felt you were the first. Alice loved her work for just this reason, so why wouldn't she fall in love with people, too?

all the girls in Alice’s generation were so tired of being told they’d been born to be raped, oppressed, silenced.

In all the stories, sojourners in Hell rarely perished there. It was in the world of the living where they met their tragic ends.

You couldn’t keep it up, counting down the seconds from one day to another.

Alice rolled her eyes. “Please don't insinuate I'm not clever enough to go to Hell.

Did Canada even have universities, or did everyone just ski and eat maple syrup and run away from bears all year round?

Some people just are that cruel. There is no design. They are not giants. They don’t do it for any reason, they just like it. And the rest of us just have to survive them.

Birth rate’s gone down, they said.” “Has it?” “Postwar boom’s over, everywhere’s developed, and all the girls are taking pills—” “Oh, is that it?” “My word.

Hell’s lonely,” said Peter. “You’ll want company.” “Hell is other people, I’ve heard.

How good it felt when she seemed to abandon her body altogether— when she became fully incorporeal, drifting happily in a universe of ideas. She was very proud of the days that she forgot to eat. Not because she had any revulsion for food, but because it was some proof that she had transcended some basic cycle of need. That she was not just an animal after all, held captive by her desires. That she was above all a mind, and the mind was capable of miraculous things.

And if you could constantly reinvent yourself, cut away the parts of you that ashamed or hurt you, then how could you ever come to really know someone else? Were people all just living paradoxes, keeping up an illusion just long enough to survive contact with others? Were people then all a series of lies in the end?

My name is Alice Law. Sometimes I am very clever but most of the time I am not. I have been a good person sometimes, and a bad person at others. Sooner or later I will die. But before I do, I will try - I will try very hard - to make it count.

No, what hurt was how easily he could reduce her to a thing. No longer a student, a mind, an inquisitive being growing and learning and becoming under him - but just the barest identity she had been afraid to be all along, which was a mere woman.

Alice found it a bit difficult to breathe just then. Her cheeks burned, and her head felt uncomfortably light. She’d hoped, as an undergraduate, that this intense physiological reaction to jealousy might eventually go away, but as she progressed through graduate school it only grew worse. Every published paper, every conference invitation, elicited a panicked, fight-or-flight response, one that she’d never gotten good at concealing.

Read Russell, for Christ’s sake.

Those who had nothing substantial to brag about bragged the loudest. Stay silent and ignore the chattering crowd—this was proof you had something real to be proud of.

Orpheus’s notes, already in archaic Greek, were largely in shreds like the rest of him.

Those who had nothing substantial to brag about bragged the loudest. Stay silent and ignore the chattering crowd - this was proof you had something real to be proud of.

The best libraries were like the best churches: old and musty, preindustrial.

Socrates was put to death for being annoying, Socrates's opinion doesn't count for anything.

Hell's not so bad for the people who are in it. They're exactly where they wanted to be.

Nothing is better than eternal happiness. A cheese toastie is better than nothing. Shouldn't stand to reason, then, that a cheese toastie is better than eternal happiness?

She knew only a version of him, at a brief moment in time.

They passed a series of rooms overflowing with texts. “Book hoarders,” Moore explained. “Why would you hoard books in a library?” “To prove that you’ve found them,” said Moore. “To prove you know of them. To prove you have proximity to them. But reading them, that’s too much.

Pascals's Wager said that you could choose to believe in God or not, but if you bet wrong on God and didn't live as though as he existed, you were missing out on the infinite wonder of Heaven.

I’ve cheated my way into being an expert, and by not doing the hours of hard rote memorization, I’ve lost something important. I’ve got this bank of knowledge, but I don’t know how to sort through

It was the absolute farce of it all, said Elspeth. One day it all seemed so silly to me, and I couldn't stop laughing about it. The symbolic system collapsed. You write a good paper, and it's rejected because your reviewer was having a bad day. You're a perfect fit for a job, and you lose to the committee chair's godson. Once you have a job it doesn't get better-do you know how many people are passed over for tenure because someone somewhere once felt they were rude at a party? I mean what's the fucking point? I couldn't keep up the charade, but I also couldn't see the value in anything else, so I put a stop to it all. I could not care anymore.

He hated this meat sack he’d been trapped in; hated every tissue and organ that sapped his attention and energy when all he wanted to do was sit and think. He demanded so little of his body, and yet it would not even afford him this.

The night sky shouldn't be so dark," Peter had told her. "If the universe is endless, then starlight should fill all the empty spaces. Light doesn't stop until it hits a surface - so why the dark spaces? From where we stand on Earth, all we should see is light." "Maybe the universe isn't limitless, then," Alice had said. "Or the universe is expanding," Peter had said. "And the stars are too young, and all that distant light is still stretching to reach us. And until it does, the night lies dark.

It always went like this - it didn't matter what she intended, it all went to shit anyway because she was so stupid, worthless, she could not stop falling apart, she could not hold the thoughts inside, she made all the wrong choices and it hurt everyone around her.

For a moment she found this prospect terrifying- that memory was not a well-kept library, but rather a moth-eaten basement with dim, flickering lights- but remembered then that this was just how everyone lived all the time; how she herself had lived most of her life. You groped around in the dark. You settled for stories, not recordings. You made do with the bits you had and tried your best to fill in the rest.

All it took was to tell a lie - and to believe, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that all the rules could be suspended. You held a conclusion in your head and believed, through sheer force of will, that everything else was wrong. You had to see the world as it was not.

For I deem that the true votary of philosophy is likely to be misunderstood by other men; they do not perceive that he is always pursuing death and dying; and if this be so, and he has had the desire of death all his life long, why when his time comes should he repine at that which he has been always pursuing and desiring?

You want me to pretend that I love you.” “It’s easy,” he said. “Just assume our wills are united.” “What does that mean?” “Well, that we want all the same things. That we want what’s best for each other. That we take one another’s ends as our own, and that our ideal outcome is one in which we’re together. Haven’t you ever been in love?

Mathematicians hated magicians.

Human minds were fallible, but hers less than most, and hers was now the only mind she could trust.

She reflected on the horrors of embodiment.

She took one glance and instantly her thinking mind shut down, as it always did when confronted with a lot of numbers. “You need to explain that to me like I’m five.

Hell is a writers’ market.

He could be imperceivable divinity, which in these circles is code for “no one’s published on this.

Wouldn’t that be nice, Alice thought. A cheese toastie here, at the end of the world.

She loved when he just rambled, effortlessly profound, without an ounce of self-consciousness. She loved seeing how he processed the world; hearing his messiest, unformed thoughts.

paradox means that somewhere along the path, we have gotten something deeply, terribly wrong.

How good it felt when she seemed to abandon her body altogether—when she became fully incorporeal, drifting happily in a universe of ideas.

The paradox—the crucial element. The word paradox comes from two Greek roots: para, meaning “against,” and doxa, meaning “belief.

He demanded so little or his body, and yet it would not even afford him this.

this was the worst thing that Professor Grimes had ever done to her - made her doubt she was a good scholar. He's destroyed her faith in her own ability to think, and to judge the results of her own thought, instead of turning to him at every step for confirmation. And it was just so unfortunate that it took his death for her to conceive, research and carry out an entire project on her own.

But she couldn't help but feel a little sting every time he brought it up. As if she'd disappointed him by being born to the wrong sort of parents, with the wrong sort of face, without connections, without a cock.

Dante’s account was so distracted with spiteful potshots that the reportage got lost within. T. S. Eliot had supplied some of the more recent and detailed landscape descriptions on record, but The Waste Land was so self-referential that its status as a sojourner’s account was under serious dispute. Orpheus’s notes, already in archaic Greek, were largely in shreds like the rest of him. And Aeneas—well, that was all Roman propaganda. Possibly

Besides, no one really meant it when they said alt academia was just as prestigious (or, more commonly, that there was no shame in it, really). They meant it even less when they emphasized that alt academia paid better, had kinder hours, was less stressful, gave you better job security, made you happier. Oh, magicians do really well in consulting, they said. Employers like critical thinking and problem-solving skills, they said. Fewer people die in industry, they said.

Everyone knew that the nicer a library was, the better the work you did within it. Nice libraries meant donors, meant support, meant the time and resources to accumulate the best collections. More important, nice libraries put you in a certain frame of mind. You could unpack the precise same set of archives in the Rad Cam or a nondescript warehouse, and still you’d do better work in the Rad Cam. The atmosphere mattered. You became the thinker the library expected you to be. Nice libraries whispered: Everyone who has passed through here is very important, and so are you.

For another, we want our lifespans back.” Alice clutched the Dialetheia close. “We’ve had a very bad time, and we didn’t get what we came for, and I feel we ought to get a refund.” King Yama fell silent for a moment. She could not read his face. Slowly he said, “You feel you ought to get a refund from Hell.

It was so humiliating the way she’d lingered, hoping for his attention—like a dog that didn’t know that it had been abandoned, that kept on coming back. He was not rude to her. In fact he was perfectly polite, wearing that classic Murdoch smile. He gave her the same kind attentiveness that he would to any stranger. But this hurt, for she had thought they were anything but.

Why wouldn't everyone strip away the parts of their selves that caused them pain? She'd like to learn that trick, she thought. If she could sift through that mess in her head, pull out the files that kept torturing her, and burn them. Every small humiliation, every shred of guilt-if only she could unclutter her mind so that all that was left was the elements she wanted to keep

Almost there,” said Peter. “You’re so close. You’ve just got to finish out.” She spoke as if in a dream, half-unaware of the words coming out her own mouth. “I feel sometimes it is so difficult to be conscious.” “I know,” said Peter. Such heavy feet. Like dragging rocks. “And I think anything would be easier. Anything at all.” “There’s time for that.” Peter grasped her by the elbow; firm, but gentle. His voice was soft. “It’ll always be waiting, Law. But we’ve got things to do.

I never understood how right Socrates was until the moment of my death, when my soul was ripped free from my body, and I was cast violently from that mortal world of base appetites. The body is the enemy, is a hindrance in the soul’s quest for the truth. It is as the Zhuangzi claims: life is a swelling tumor, and death the bursting of a boil. We are slaves to the body! All it provides is distractions—fantasies, desires, illnesses, fears. We are bounded, and death is the ultimate freedom.

Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem.” “Of what?” “It’s a theorem in mathematics.” Peter sounded bizarrely chipper. “I learned about it when I was a child. Basically, it says no theory of mathematics can ever be complete, because for any reasonable mathematical system there will always be truths that the system cannot prove. Math has its limits. There’s always something we don’t know. Some people think Gödel’s theorem proves the existence of God.” “But it doesn’t prove anything at all.” “It does, though. It proves there’s always another option. It proves no system is ever closed.

Theories of reincarnation overlap nicely with theories of eternal recurrence, an idea championed by both Friedrich Nietzsche and the Pythagoreans. Broadly understood, eternal recurrence argues that the events of the universe are fated—or doomed—to repeat themselves over and over again, for there is a finite amount of energy and material in an infinite universe, over an infinite amount of time, and the combinations with which they can interact are finite as well. The eternal hourglass of existence, so to speak, turns over time and time again. We are reborn to flow with the sand. Unfortunately, scholarly consensus only goes this far. Tartarologists disagree wildly over how reincarnation works. How long must one wait before rebirth? Is rebirth familial—does your dead grandmother become your daughter? Do karmic goodness and badness accrue over time, so that the virtuous live better and better lives? Can one ever escape the cycle of reincarnation, as the Buddhists hope? Can human souls be reborn into animal bodies? For that matter, do animals have souls at all? We know memories are washed clean between lives, for there is no record of anyone credibly remembering a past life. We know very little else for certain. Most baffling of all is the question of punishment. What purpose does it serve? Is it rehabilitative—must we only suffer until we’ve learned our lessons? Is it retributive—must we balance the karmic scales, lose an eye for an eye, and suffer as much as the suffering we wrought? How many hours in pits of boiling water balance out a murder? Is punishment a form of contrapasso, as Dante describes, wherein punishments arise from the nature of the sin itself and represent wrongdoing’s poetic opposite? Does punishment entail the universalization of broken maxims, as Kant theorized? Is Hell one great metaphysical manifestation of the Golden Rule?

Reasons and Persons argues for a reductionist account of personal identity: that is to say, no special essence of personhood that remains stable across one’s lifetime. Using a number of thought experiments involving brain transplants, brain divisions, and tele-transportation, Parfit argued that the qualities which we think define essential personhood—psychological connectedness, for instance—do not actually ground any deeper fact. We might share the same cells, bodily continuity, and memories as previous iterations of ourselves. But that is all. There is no further fact of the matter—no essential us hovering like a specter. We bear the same relationship to the version of ourselves from ten years ago as we might to a sibling.