Martin Silenus had been working on his Cantos for more than two standard centuries. His (Location 2908)
he wanted only to finish it, to know the outcome himself, and to set each stanza, each line, each word, in the finest, clearest, most beautiful form (Location 2922)
consciousness can evolve to a plane more benevolent than its counterpoint of a universe hardwired to indifference.” (Location 3876)
Pain is the curl and foam of a wave that does not break. (Location 4344)
and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books. (Location 4609)
Losing our ignorance can be dangerous because our ignorance is a shield. —I’ve never been too fond of ignorance. (Location 4791)
cannot help but smile at this least poetic of men’s unconscious use of assonance. I suddenly imagine us sitting up long nights in that dark hulk of a building as I teach him how to pair such technique with masculine or feminine caesura, or the joys of alternating iambic foot with unstressed pyrrhic, or the self-indulgence of the frequent spondee. (Location 6439)
“Man and his machine intelligences. Which is a parasite on the other? Neither part of the symbiote can now tell. But it is an evil thing, a work of the Anti-Nature. Worse than that, Duré, it is an evolutionary dead end.” (Location 6530)
how much less silly was it to trust a device that punched holes in the fabric of space-time and allowed one to step through black hole “trapdoors”? How silly was it for her to trust the Core to transport her to the infirmary? (Location 6671)
There is a certain solipsism to serious illness which claims all of one’s attention as certainly as an astronomical black hole seizes anything unlucky enough to fall within its critical radius. (Location 7053)
My brain receives this as din and restructures it as poetry. All day and all night the pain of the universe floods in and wanders the fevered corridors of my mind as verse, imagery, images in verse, the intricate, endless dance of language, now as calming as a flute solo, now as shrill and strident and confusing as a dozen orchestras tuning up, but always verse, always poetry. (Location 7059)
The rainwater comment answers everything and nothing, as so much of science has for so long. As Ummon and the other Masters teach, it explains why the giraffe evolved a long neck but never why the other animals did not. It explains why humankind evolved to intelligence, but not why the tree near the front gate refused to. (Location 7380)
“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.” (Location 8424)
experience the same sense of shame and sudden, awkward revelation which we have all had in our dreams when we realize that we have forgotten to get dressed and have come naked to some public place or social gathering. (Location 8428)
Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice. (Location 8692)
Sol had written that whatever form God now took in human consciousness—whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution—humankind could no longer agree to offer up sacrifice in God’s name. Sacrifice and the agreement to sacrifice had written human history in blood. (Location 8699)
Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham. (Location 8708)
Abraham came not to sacrifice, but to know once and for all whether this God was a god to be trusted and obeyed. No other test would do. (Location 8713)
God evolved, and Sol was sure that God must, then that evolution was toward empathy—toward a shared sense of suffering rather than power and dominion. (Location 8721)
Love, that most banal of things, that most clichéd of religious motivations, had more power—Sol now knew—than did strong nuclear force or weak nuclear force or electromagnetism or gravity. (Location 8726)
