33 quotes found
“And just as he said of me, the thing that his heart desired was not the thing that he professed to want.”
“This is the last moment of contentment untainted by sorrow, when the brain hesitates before delivering the message to the heart that it knows it must.”
“In the middle of all the world's incessant noise, her message was music, and music was a thing that I'd mostly lived my life without. In the ten years since I'd last seen Miranda she'd come to some...”
“As he drifted off, his father came to visit him, clothed in all his possible shapes.”
“But I cannot accept a vision of You as an engineer who spends His days maintaining the machine of morality. I cannot take the idea of You as an optimizer, introducing evil into human affairs in an ...”
“She drank the glass with breakfast and poured herself another. By the time she'd gotten Sean off to school (second grade) the edges had been taken off her thoughts and the world seemed as it should...”
“In the moment when he died at my hand he had his own heart's desirenot the actual future, but a hope for the best possible future, one that he could not himself imagine.”
“As an act of goodwill you must sacrifice all the futures you might have for the one that he designs for you.”
“I have already lost the knowledge of the word whose sound has the shape of a soul. But perhaps it's not too late. Come with me. Hurry now. We still have a chance to be young.”
“And so Rebecca consigned herself to, not ignorance, but a judicious incuriosity: she decided, for the time being, to live with the constant, cryptic reminders that the scope of another person's sou...”
“The palimpsests of molecules need not be overwritten, for machines make once-ephemeral words persist: they collect in gutters; they pile up and require sweeping; they hang in air like morning fog.”
“It is time to put down the pen; time to clear the throat. Speaking is a different thing altogether from writing. The spoken word has different properties, and different powers. If I have learned an...”
“But life isn't neat the way a story is. And if you try to pretend it is, then you just make yourself unhappy, or screw yourself over.”
“Soon our culture's oldest dreams will be made real. Even the thought of sending a kind of flying craft to the moon is no longer nothing more than a child's fantasy. At this moment in the cities bel...”
“I still have enough faith in language to believe that if I place enough words next to each other on the page, they will start to speak with sounds of their own.”
“There was a graduate student in my cohort, this guy I dated, who told me he came to realize that doing physics is like this: there's a concrete wall twenty feet thick, and you're on one side, and o...”
“The scientific method entails two assumptions that are so basic that, even if you spell them out, they are still difficult to keep in mind. First: that the observer stays the same while the world c...”
“I truly do not know, and that unnameable feeling that comes with not knowing: it must be worse than grief. It must.”
“This had been happening more and more often: the two of us come upon each other by accident in the early hours of the morning and take solace in each others' company, weathering out the peril of be...”
“Perhaps my gift to you will be as simple as a single word, whispered into your ear by one of your servants as you lie on your deathbed, a word that solves a final mystery and makes it easy for you ...”
