Stories of Your Life and Others

And then it came to him: a seal cylinder. When rolled upon a tablet of soft clay, the carved cylinder left an imprint that formed a picture. Two figures might appear at opposite ends of the tablet, though they stood side by side on the surface of the cylinder. All the world was as such a cylinder. Men imagined heaven and earth as being at the ends of a tablet, with sky and stars stretched between; yet the world was wrapped around in some fantastic way so that heaven and earth touched. (Location 508)

They lack the power to express concepts that I need, and even in their own domain, they’re imprecise and unwieldy. They’re hardly fit for speech, let alone thought. (Location 875)

I immediately counter with seven words, four that summarize the distinctions between my insight and his, and three that describe a nonobvious result of the distinctions. He responds. (Location 1093)

Her concentration was gone, and last night she had had a nightmare about discovering a formalism that let her translate arbitrary concepts into mathematical expressions: then she had proven that life and death were equivalent. (Location 1387)

The first came to him as he was racing through the house, wondering if she had gotten some cyanide from the chemistry department: it was the realization that, because he couldn’t understand what had brought her to such an action, he couldn’t feel anything for her. (Location 1430)

It’s so unfair: I’m going to give birth to an animated voodoo doll of myself. I didn’t see this in the contract when I signed up. Was this part of the deal? (Location 1983)

The physical universe was a language with a perfectly ambiguous grammar. Every physical event was an utterance that could be parsed in two entirely different ways, one causal and the other teleological, both valid, neither one disqualifiable no matter how much context was available. (Location 2219)

According to speech act theory, statements like “You’re under arrest,” “I christen this vessel,” or “I promise” were all performative: a speaker could perform the action only by uttering the words. For such acts, knowing what would be said didn’t change anything. Everyone at a wedding anticipated the words “I now pronounce you husband and wife,” but until the minister actually said them, the ceremony didn’t count. With performative language, saying equaled doing. (Location 2292)

Once, a woman he’d been dating for several weeks broke off their relationship, explaining that while she herself didn’t consider his leg a defect, whenever they were seen in public together other people assumed there must be something wrong with her for being with him, and surely he could understand how unfair that was to her? (Location 3564)

He understood how life was an undeserved bounty, how even the most virtuous were not worthy of the glories of the mortal plane. (Location 3812)

I’m not even really paying attention to the products. I just think they’re amazing to watch. (Location 4108)

Are we more fully realized when we minimize the physical part of our natures? And that, you have to agree, is a profound question. (Location 4192)

Doesn’t mean I want to wear beer goggles all the time. (Location 4288)