Home > Author > Carolyn Ives Gilman
1 " I knew I was really there, because I was the thing his arms encircled, the thing his love defined. "
― Carolyn Ives Gilman , Halfway Human
2 " I may not know what my heart truly holds, but who does? I think we're all mysteries, even to ourselves. "
3 " I'm perfectly natural the way I am. Why can't you humans ever understand that I might not want to be afflicted with gender? "
4 " To die this way seems so random, so trivial. I have been robbed of meaning before being robbed of life. To die in darkness, alone -- for what purpose was I ever alive. It is as if I emerged from darkness into delusion, then sank back into darkness forever. "
― Carolyn Ives Gilman , Dark Orbit
5 " Powerlessness is such a lure, such a poisonous lure. "
6 " The core principle is that our senses receive a far broader spectrum of messages than the narrow range we are taught to pay attention to. Our brains still receive many of those messages, but they are shunted into the subliminal and subconscious, and surface only as intuitions, emotions, premonitions, dreams, and visions. If we study those experiences not as illusions but as cues to other modes of apprehension, it might give us access to layers of reality we barely suspect, since the evidence for them is drowned out by the noise of ordinary perception. "
7 " You are far too cynical for someone your age.""Well people are disappointing!" Thorn said."Yes, but they are also complicated. I would wager there is something about him you do not know. It is the only thing we can ever say about people with absolute certainty: that we don't know the whole story. "
― Carolyn Ives Gilman
8 " We’re all inadequate,” David answered. “Just think: the light from the outside world is mapped onto the retina, then further mapped onto the visual cortex, then broken apart and analyzed in other areas of the brain. At every step there’s a loss of information. In the end, what we are aware of is not the outside world per se, but the image of the world projected onto our brains. Plato was anatomically right; we do see shadows on a wall. "
9 " I didn’t know it then, but I could never turn back once I had learned this. To see something you must cease to be it. "
10 " commodification of information is the only thing that’s made space travel economically feasible. It’s the only commodity whose value exceeds its transportation cost. We’d be exporting biologicals or photonics if it paid. But our trading partners can build the machines and grow the organics much cheaper than we can send them, if they just have the codes and specs. If information were free, the way the radicals want, then there would be nothing to trade, and there goes the only incentive for interstellar ties. "
11 " Nay,” he said. “Awareness is unbounded, undifferentiated, and is present in all things. It doth not distinguish between ‘I’ and all else, because it dwelleth in everything. Consciousness is a manifestation of awareness that is bounded and particular. It is concentrated in a single place and time, and is limited to a single point of view. Consciousness continually reacheth out toward awareness, to join it, but it cannot without giving up what it is. The grain of salt cannot experience the brine without dissolving. "
12 " What kind of word is ‘methodal’?” David asked. “A buzzword,” Ashok answered, this time himself. “Methodal. Sounds like a drug.” “That’s what buzzwords are. Tranquilizers.” “Thought suppressants, you mean. "
13 " Sara had grown up in a Balavati family, which meant she had been taught to reject all articles of faith except disrespect for authority, the lodestone of her life. "
14 " We bemind people all the time—making assumptions, creating illusory roles for them—and it alters their reality. They start to become what we expect them to be, "
15 " Sara sometimes thought hat planetary gravity warped the imagination, bent perspective till the horizon was uncomfortably close, and everyone had a uniform myopia, "
16 " Forgetting is what nature does best. The universe is a huge forgetting machine. It erases information no matter how hard we try to hang onto it. How could it be any different? What if the memory of everything that ever happened still existed? The universe would be clogged with information, so packed with it we couldn’t move. We’d be paralyzed, because every moment we ever lived would still be with us. It would be hell. "
― Carolyn Ives Gilman , Arkfall
17 " Faith in knowledge is the principle you will never back away from, the thing you protect when everything else is gone. Creating it is your highest calling. Destroying it, or polluting it, is the unforgivable sin. Learning is your righteousness, research is your sacrament, discovery is your revelation. You believe not in a transcendent God but in a transcendent truth that we all can strive toward through learning. You are profoundly religious people, in your way. "
18 " And yet, what is a lunatic but a person whose evidence we discount because it is at variance with the norm? Someone on the far end of the bell curve. "
