Home > Work > Spin (Spin, #1)
1 " Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living. "
― Robert Charles Wilson , Spin (Spin, #1)
2 " We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere. "
3 " The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange. "
4 " If the world doesn't come to an end in the next thirty or forty years,' he said, 'we may be facing disaster. "
5 " There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. Its hard to live in all those kinds of times. Easy to forget that you live in all of them. "
6 " We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced. "
7 " Stick out your arms," he'd say, "straight out at your sides," and when he had you in the appropriate cruciform position he'd say, "Left index finger to right index finger straight across your heart, that's the history of the Earth. You know what human history is? Human history is the nail on your right-hand index finger. Not even the whole nail. Just that little white part. The part you clip off when it gets too long. That's the discovery of fire and the invention of writing and Galileo and Newton and the moon landing and 9/11 and last week and this morning. Compared to evolution we're newborns. Compared to geology, we barely exist "
8 " Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be settled by the storm. "
9 " But the world is what it is and won’t be bargained with. "
10 " ...slept too long. And I don’t much like the world I woke up to. "
11 " When people come to understand how big the universe is and how short a human life is, their hearts cry out. Sometimes it’s a shout of joy: I think that’s what it was for Jason; I think that’s what I didn’t understand about him. He had the gift of awe. But for most of us it’s a cry of terror. The terror of extinction, the terror of meaninglessness. Our hearts cry out. Maybe to God, or maybe just to break the silence. "
12 " Fifteen minutes shy of two o’clock. The thick of the night. The zone of lost objectivity. "
13 " Mortality, a writer of my generation once said, trumps morality. "
14 " knowledge wasn’t created but discovered; "
15 " We’re as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere. "
16 " Amazing, I thought, how busily we had turned ourselves into people who didn't know one another very well. "
17 " The Spin’s not just some abstract phenomenon—you guys made them look the beast in the eye, and good for you, I guess, but if your project goes wrong you steal that courage away again, and now it’s worse because they’ve seen the thing. And they will not love you for failing, Tyler, because it will leave them more frightened than they’ve ever been. "
18 " Here she was back in the brightly lit world she had been avoiding for twenty years, and it was exactly as awful as she remembered it. "
19 " We are as ephemeral as rain drops. "
20 " I wanted to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder and settle down forever in July second. "
