The artificial stunts, the occasional genuine firefight. He had known both. It was dangerously difficult, once embarked, to remember which was which.
What's the point in this self-flagellation? Do you think that the Big Machines will look down and see how patiently you've suffered, and take pity?
I'm forty-seven years old. At my age one doesn't hesitate when lightning strikes.
One could not know the truth, one could only choose one's risk.
The Big Machines could look after themselves. They had to, these days. No one else in charge!
You can't stop struggling. But while you're at it you have to remember you're only a symptom, not a cure.
When two strangers meet neither of them knows what to believe, and the advantage goes to the boldest liar.
The world remains indivisible, though we can only think of it in pieces.
One doesn't fight facts. One puts them to use.
There was no order in the cosmos any more, only the shocking certainty that _anything can happen_; and a proliferation of fortune-telling theory.
We have entered a post-literary world. We cannot record detail. _There is too much._ We must resort to diagram and algorithm.
It's always a shock when a major suspicion is finally confirmed.
He had learned once that everybody dreams, but only those who use language can describe the state to themselves.
It's because you and I are addicted to the thing called 'meaning' that we use words, and have responsibilities, and people who depend on us.
What harms us ever harms us now.
How do you tell if you're dreaming? Try continuous memory. If you can string the course of the day together without waking yourself, then however bad things seem you are probably awake already.
When the world is bursting into flame around you, you don't agonize over what happened hours, or even minutes, ago. You grab what the moment offers.
Who knows why we played together? Some common feeling that the people around us were aliens, and out to get us.
To talk about the beloved, this is the great hunger of the bereaved.
Consciousness. What is it? It is the inscription in us of the nature of things.
When a thing becomes more complex it does not change, it only becomes _more of itself_.
The soul must not carry excess baggage when it travels.
The quiet mind, like reality itself, is a fiction.
When a bio-physicist, who is totally world class, tells you she's going to make you one with the essence of being, and she seems to mean it...Johnny was a sucker for that kind of thing, it was his secret vice.
Telepaths don't lie, they only translate their terms.
She was afraid at every step that she would fall out of this precarious reality into a spasming void where _anger_ was the rock, _fear_ the air, shame and guilt the space that held her.
I kind of partly feel as if I'm still spread over the sum of all the possibilities. It's remarkably like a monstrous hangover.
Carlotta considered that people who held 'secret' meetings should be debarred from public office as being of subnormal intelligence.
_Gamers._ The magic word. You could do anything, under that explanation. But your enemies could use the same excuse.
There was always an explanation for every knot and nodule of difference in the texture of the world. It might be right down in the hardware, the part that grows like a coral: except that unlike a coral it does not die when conditions change, it continually redesigns and cannibalizes itself.