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61 " Do you think Bubbles wants Chinese food because it's made out of cats?" Genevieve questioned, shoveling a big bite into her mouth." Genevieve, that's just gross and wrong. Don't say things like that. Bubbles is a dog, and their stomachs are bottomless pits. They'll eat anything and everything in sight." Genevieve quickly swallowed. " Well, Bobby said in China they eat cats." " Gen, I assure you, we.are.not eating cats," I responded slowly trying to make sure another food wasn't crossed off her 'will eat' list. It was ever growing shorter." All lies!" Genevieve proclaimed, sticking her fork high in the air with a piece of chicken, only to have it fall, never touching the floor. " See? Cat! "
62 " The Greenland fjords are peculiar for the spells of completely quiet weather, when there is not enough wind to blow out a match and the water is like a sheet of glass. The kayak hunter must sit in his boat without stirring a finger so as not to scare the shy seals away. Actually, he can only move his eyes, as even the slightest move otherwise might mean game lost. The sun, low in the sky, sends a glare into his eyes, and the landscape around moves into the realm of the unreal. The reflex from the mirror-like water hypnotizes him, he seems to be unable to move, and all of a sudden it is as if he were floating in a bottomless void, sinking, sinking, and sinking.... Horror-stricken, he tries to stir, to cry out, but he cannot, he is completely paralyzed, he just falls and falls. "
63 " Individualists and collectivists both have been wronged by the government, and we all maintain (consciously or subconsciously) a list of the ways our lives have been diminished by its bureaucracies and actions. One of the differences between the collectivists and the individualists is that those wrongs are front and center for the individualists, whereas the collectivists are blind to those wrongs, or they excuse those wrongs, or they forgive those wrongs. " Use us," the collectivists say, while they throw not only themselves into the bottomless pit that is the Administrative State, but everybody else too. "
64 " People who are depressed at the thought that all our motives are selfish are [confused]. They have mixed up ultimate causation (why something evolved by natural selection) with proximate causation (how the entity works here and now). [A] good way to understand the logic of natural selection is to imagine that genes are agents with selfish motives. [T]he genes have metaphorical motives — making copies of themselves — and the organisms they design have real motives. But they are not the same motives. Sometimes the most selfish thing a gene can do is wire unselfish motives into a human brain — heartfelt, unstinting, deep-in-the-marrow unselfishness. The love of children (who carry one's genes into posterity), a faithful spouse (whose genetic fate is identical to one's own), and friends and allies (who trust you if you're trustworthy) can be bottomless and unimpeachable as far as we humans are concerned (proximate level), even if it is metaphorically self-serving as far as the genes are concerned (ultimate level). Combine this with the common misconception that the genes are a kind of essence or core of the person, and you get a mongrel of Dawkins and Freud: the idea that the metaphorical motives of the genes are the deep, unconscious, ulterior motives of the person. That is an error. "
― Steven Pinker , The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
65 " Bitterness and resentment are a bottomless well. They can only be healed by the phenomenon of someone else's sorrow rising to your level of pain... it never happens - save yourself endless hurt. "
― Steve Maraboli
66 " She was this girl living in a bottomless hole of her thoughts.One day she saw a light. She felt the warmth and walked in its direction.It was there that she found him.He spoke to her and wove tendrils of love on her heart.His compassion was over whelming for her. His words, his love, his eyes- everything about him was so pure, so true. Her heart was getting intertwined with the love he was bestowing upon her. The mesh of affection he weaved around her heart made it breathe. And live.Vine by vine the mesh thickened. Today, he is her beloved. They are inseparable.He smiles, she smiles. They weave dreams.She loves him beyond infinity. He has her heart strings. And as he walks, she walks with him. "
67 " But the Turing test cuts both ways. You can't tell if a machine has gotten smarter or if you've just lowered your own standards of intelligence to such a degree that the machine seems smart. If you can have a conversation with a simulated person presented by an AI program, can you tell how far you've let your sense of personhood degrade in order to make the illusion work for you?People degrade themselves in order to make machines seem smart all the time. Before the crash, bankers believed in supposedly intelligent algorithms that could calculate credit risks before making bad loans. We ask teachers to teach to standardized tests so a student will look good to an algorithm. We have repeatedly demonstrated our species' bottomless ability to lower our standards to make information technology look good. Every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous. The same ambiguity that motivated dubious academic AI projects in the past has been repackaged as mass culture today. Did that search engine really know what you want, or are you playing along, lowering your standards to make it seem clever? While it's to be expected that the human perspective will be changed by encounters with profound new technologies, the exercise of treating machine intelligence as real requires people to reduce their mooring to reality. "
― Jaron Lanier , You Are Not a Gadget
68 " Every time I go to sleep, I know I may never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping that when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn't been gnawed to bones by nameless beast below. Hoping you pull up anything at all. Maybe this is why I only sleep a few hours a month. I don't want to die again. This has become clearer and clearer to me recently, a desire so sharp and focused I can hardly believe it's mine: I don't want to die. I don't want to disappear. I want to stay. "
― Isaac Marion , Warm Bodies (Warm Bodies, #1)
69 " I heard Mansour say to Richard, ‘You transmitted to us the disease of your capitalist economy. What did you give us except for a handful of capitalist companies that drew off our blood — and still do?’ Richard said to him, ‘All this shows that you cannot manage to live without us. You used to complain about colonialism and when we left you created the legend of neo-colonialism. It seems that our presence, in an open or undercover form, is as indispensable to you as air and water.’ They were not angry: they said such things to each other as they laughed, a stone’s throw from the Equator, with a bottomless historical chasm separating the two of them. "
― Tayeb Salih , Season of Migration to the North
70 " It was the very discomfort, the blows, the cold, the thirst that kept us aloft in the void of bottomless despair, both during the journey and after. It was not the will to live, nor a conscious resignation; for few are the men capable of such resolution, and we were but a common sample of humanity. "
― Primo Levi , Survival in Auschwitz
71 " Either way, he was always staring into a bottomless pit, or into a whirlpool that forever sucked him inexorably inward to its vortex. "
― , Dancing with Clara
72 " An abuser can seem emotionally needy. You can get caught in a trap of catering to him, trying to fill a bottomless pit. But he’s not so much needy as entitled, so no matter how much you give him, it will never be enough. He will just keep coming up with more demands because he believes his needs are your responsibility, until you feel drained down to nothing. "
― Lundy Bancroft , Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men
73 " You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees bottomless pit in yours. "
― Neal Shusterman , Challenger Deep
74 " Insanity is a very lonely and empty existence - it’s painfully true. They may laugh and smile, and skip and dance, but behind all the faces there is hollowness like a bottomless pit. The living dead, depression is a terrible illness, so is psychosis, the mentally inflicted beyond cure. "
― , Insanity: My Mad Life
75 " You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees a bottomless pit in yours. "
76 " Fucking hell,” he whispered, closing his eyes. The pain in his face mirrored the deep ache in her bones. He lifted her hand to his mouth and traced his lips slowly across her palm. With incredible gentleness, he pulled her arm toward him and pressed a warm kiss to the pulse on her wrist, his breath washing over the delicate skin and casting a spell as bottomless and dark as shame. "
77 " To write is to stand at the edge of a bottomless well, unafraid of falling in. "
― Steven Ramirez
78 " I grasped the mirror to look closer at the strange girl in the reflection. Yes, I could see some similarities. The shape of the face was the same, but with all the changes it looked unearthly. The reflection was beautiful ... extremely beautiful--small, pink lips ... pale and glowing skin ... fine white hair. But I couldn't stop focusing on the eyes. The bottomless blue was shocking in the midst of white. She could have competed against Lydia. No, she would have blown Lydia out of the water. "
― M.L. LeGette , The Unicorn Girl
79 " Greed is a bottomless pit which exhausts the person in an endless effort to satisfy the need without ever reaching satisfaction. "
― Erich Fromm , Escape from Freedom
80 " Her eyes were a bottomless ocean that I would give up air to explore. "
― Cora Carmack , Faking It (Losing It, #2)
