Rf Kuang Katabasis Quotes

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

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.

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

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

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.

I feel sometimes it is so difficult to be conscious.

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

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

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

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

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!

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

And over there—creative writing students.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Read Russell, for Christ’s sake.

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.

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

Loss of identity was a terrifying prospect.

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

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.

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.

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?

Mathematicians hated magicians.

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

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

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

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

She reflected on the horrors of embodiment.

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

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.

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

Hell is a writers’ market.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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?

You can’t knock about a closed system forever; the possibilities run out.

There are always exceptions. There’s always something unexplainable, meaning at some level everything becomes possible.

The trick of magick is to defy, trouble, or, at the very least, dislodge belief. Magick succeeds by casting confusion and doubt. Magick taunts physics and makes her cry.

You thought the world was one way and then it wasn’t. One could become zero. One could become two. A blink of an eye, and the fact of the matter was not. If the world could be fluid for you once, how many more times could you make it dance according to your whims?

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

Hell was full of minor tragedies. There was no point fretting over this one.

need to get down,” she told Peter. For one of them had to keep the cheer; one of them had to be delusional. This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional. “I’m sure

You’ll take root,” said the knob. “You’ll take the form most pleasing and stable to you, if only you can quiet your mind.

Alice Law, you naughty girl. You’re trying to go to Hell.

When Peter laughed it felt like the entire warmth of the sun was turned on her, because she had done it, she had uttered the words that so surprised and delighted him that he couldn't even breathe. There was a time when she felt all she ever wanted to do was to make Peter Murdoch laugh.

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

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.

Who wants to be an earthworm? Who wants to be a dung beetle? Or worse—to be born with human cognition but have no opportunity to exercise it. On balance human suffering vastly outweighs the pleasures of human life, and we were all just lucky enough to end up where we did in our past lives. But who among you could go from college housing to the streets? Not to mention forgetting! Why should we want our memories stripped clean? How is the Lethe different from death? Better to exist as we are, here, and now. We follow the example of the Morning Star. We make our own paradise in Hell—God has no hold on us!

No—the reason paradoxes trouble us is because their absurd conclusions make us rethink all of our premises. A paradox is like a staircase, in which each step leads inexorably to the destination. But you get to the top, and the destination is impossible; you’ve stepped off into empty air. So one of the steps must be folly. Because the conclusion must necessarily be false, because we cannot live in a world where logic does not work, one of our premises must necessarily be flawed. This is the source of our unease. A paradox means that somewhere along the path, we have gotten something deeply, terribly wrong.

Perhaps the gift of rationality did not outweigh the debilitating agony that came with it.

I refuse to give him that credit. He was just the symptom, you see. It took me many years to realize this. Every time he yelled at me, or picked me apart, or humiliated me in front of other students—this was just the whole symbolic order coming to a head. This is an arbitrary game of egos and narcissists and bullying perceived as strength. And he was the perfect incarnation of the system’s nonsense.

Hell reveals itself to you in whatever order it so chooses.

Whatever your preference, what distinguishes everyday chalk and magical chalk is that magical chalk writes on almost every surface.

I don’t, I really don’t—oh, gods, Peter, just let me die.” “Can’t. Won’t.

The whole endeavour of graduate study was clinging to vanishingly small hopes. To be a magician was to be that tortoise racing Achilles...

She had never felt anything so sharp. Before she had only thought this grief theoretical, a grief that exceeded what words could describe. The only thing that came close was the Classical Chinese phrase “斷腸,” because although the words translated figuratively meant “a broken heart,” 腸 meant literally all one’s internal organs and viscera, and for a heart to break meant that everything felt twisted and ripped apart and spilled onto the sand. A heart didn’t just break, a heart yanked out the rest of you.

believe I am having a panic attack.

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.

They go for your stomach first, she heard David Attenborough say. Not the artery, they don’t kill you right away; they want you fresh, unspoiled; they’ll eat you slow, you’ll feel every bite—

It was in the world of living where they met their tragic ends.

Blasted magicians,” hissed the Shade. “No respect.” The pain to her ribs was terrible, but Alice was too excited to mind. “How do you know we’re magicians?” “Chalk all over your hands,” said the Shade. “Chalk on your kneecaps. What else are you, cokeheads?

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.

How unfair this was, she thought. As if she had never seen him asleep. As if she had not curled in next to him many times, their breathing deep in matching rhythm, both of them murmuring about stars and numbers until their conjectures bled over into dreams. It used to be so easy. Yet here they were, negotiating space like strangers.

Alice double-checked his inscriptions and realized to her dismay that his work was perfect. She would have preferred he’d made an error that left him limbless.

Anyhow, tired to the point of collapse was a default state. The expectation was simply that, through some combination of strong coffee and Lembas Bread, one pushed through until all deadlines were met and one could collapse into an indefinite coma without consequence. Alice had spent most of graduate school in this state, and it was not so bad.

THE OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY DEFINES VALIDITY AS ..." and "SINCE THE DAWN OF TIME, MANKIND HAS BEEN TROUBLED BY THE PROBLEM OF RATIONALITY.

Wickedness felt better when you had a coconspirator; otherwise it was just you and your conscience.

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.

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.

Do it or you'll die, Alice snapped. Move, Murdoch. Don't think, just do it.

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