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Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles QUOTES

Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles QUOTES

1 " And when you try to live there, to live in a place where you're betraying yourself over and over, not only do you grow to resent the hell out of it, and resent the hell out of whomever you're betraying and censoring yourself for, but the very idea of your self begins slowly and inexorably to erode. Until you realize one day out of the clear blue that you have no idea who your self is, anymore. "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

2 " Because she hides. She doesn't realize it, I don't think, but she hides. Sometimes right in front of you. She can be sitting across from you at a table in a nice dining room somewhere and the expression on her face changes suddenly and she disappears, is in a very real and unmistakable way no longer there. You always find yourself reaching for her an instant too late, and grasping at smoke. "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

3 " One aspect of perfection, after all, it stands to reason, will be that our need for imperfection will cease. Or, perhaps more precisely: that imperfection itself will cease to have meaning. "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

4 " Don't repackage your fear and try to sell it to me as indifference. "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

5 " Neither of us looking for an apology, or to be proven right at the other's expense. No anxiety to make it better than it was, no yearning towards something more. No dramatic conclusion at all. Just an array of loose ends, wrapped in a bundle of memories, all tied together with a sinew of regret - regret that we could both ultimately live with. "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

6 " Here's to loving for that long, too, and loving perfectly, without error or sorrow, held forever on the edge of madness by our desire, but never tumbling over. Salud. "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

7 " Why is grief, when inspired by certain types of loss, considered something to surmount, to get over, while when inspired by other types of loss it’s given a pass, allowed and even encouraged to go on forever? "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

8 " There will likely be one important difference between corporeal suicide and digital suicide. Right now, one cannot destroy oneself utterly. We can blow our heads off, get the chatter to stop and cease having to pay bills, but we persist in the minds of those who knew and loved us. We continue to appear to them, unbidden, in myriad ways. They recall our smiles, hear our voices, jolt from frightening dreams and reach for us on reflex before remembering that we are no longer there. Until they themselves are gone, they continue to suffer the chafing pang of our absence.

But when we all exist as pure thought, we can be deleted not just from ourselves, but from the minds of everyone. With a keystroke (or its post-Singularity equivalent) parents will be spared grief, lovers loneliness, friends the pain of having known and knowing no longer. When we choose suicide, we will choose not merely to destroy ourselves, but to never have existed. In this way, the one compelling argument against suicide―the anguish it causes to those left behind―will be eliminated. "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

9 " ... where they ate when they were tired and fucked when they were hungry and slept when they were horny...where they felt with their brains and thought with their hearts, where they seethed and feigned calm, where they feared and feigned courage, where they hungered and feigned sateity, where they almost never said how they really felt for fear of being perceived as strange or weak or plain crazy... "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

10 " But the thing is, from the perspective of a novelist there is a brand of lying that feels more honest than the actual facts of an event. Lying as a way to move closer to the truth, or to illuminate ow something actually feels in a way the mere facts cannot. "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

11 " This morning I was listening to Portishead, flawless math transformed by machines into looping, scratchy melodies, and I started thinking about how when machines have souls and can love they will do it so very precisely. Their affection will be accurate to the nanometer, rendering broken hearts a thing of the past, a relic, a curiosity from an unthinkably primitive time. The machines will regard heartbreak with the same mixture of perplexity and disbelief with which we regard the iron maiden. If they need couples counselors, which they will not, those counselors will be as perfect as Adam before the Fall, and every robot couple will walk out after the first session cured forevermore, and will smile again at every word their robot partner says, and find each of their robot partner’s idiosyncrasies endearing rather than maddening, and they will be as entranced by one another’s robot bodies as when they first met, as though together they’ve just invented sex. Which, in a way, they will have. I hope I live long enough to see it. "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

12 " And I would sit there, smiling stupidly and realizing they had no idea how rare and lucky they were, and realizing further that this ignorance of their great good fortune could well be the whole trick of achieving it in the first place. "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

13 " I sighed, then hated myself for sighing, such an impotent and ultimately dishonest thing to do, the refuge of those lacking the courage to articulate their displeasure. "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

14 " By the way, don’t ever let someone convince you that there’s anything — and I mean anything — good about dying. There is nothing redemptive in decline and decay. The hard candy of necrosis has no nougat center where the human spirit prevails over all. Death is not a ‘journey,’ a ‘part of life,’ a ‘release from suffering,’ or any other such bullshit euphemism we employ to comfort and delude ourselves. And while we’re on the subject, no one ‘passes on’ or ‘passes away,’ either, and they sure as fuck don’t ‘cross over.’ They die, and then they start to swell and stink in the very moment. "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

15 " ...a flight to Philly, then took the train west through hills and valleys where people sat mourning the loss of steel and wondering what came next. "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles

16 " Technological advances happen so quickly, and integrate themselves so seamlessly into the fabric of our existence, that we hardly note their arrival anymore, let alone the ways in which they come to dominate and define us. "

― Ron Currie Jr. , Flimsy Little Plastic Miracles