My Favorite Quotes From Circadian Algorithms

Here are some of my favorite lines from my new novel, Circadian Algorithms, a techno and psychological thriller about dreams and sleep. You’ll have to read the book to get the full context!

“An actual fucking gun riding shotgun. Who had he become? It was insane how fast everything could change, especially for the worse.”

“Why did everything seem so much worse, every problem so unsolvable, in the middle of the night?”

“…you can’t wake up if you never went to sleep in the first place.”

“But she couldn’t help wondering if perhaps on some level we craved the paradoxical sense of loneliness and anonymity found in an overcrowded metropolis.”

“He sat down on the edge of the pool and dipped his feet into the water, still wearing tattered designer dress shoes like a goddamn psychopath, and sighed.”

“Having kids was like crossing a singularity’s event horizon: It was impossible to foresee the subsequent changes, and impossible to go back.”

“And you only remember the dreams you have immediately before waking, if you remember them at all. You could dream about all kinds of things without realizing it.”

“I think coincidences are just further proof we’re living in a simulation. It’s gotta be computationally expensive to model all this madness, so the program optimizes memory by reusing resources where it calculates it can get away with it.”

“When a tree falls in the forest and no one is around, it makes a sound if the algorithm determines it’s relevant to the simulation.”

“On second thought, Preston was wrong; anyone who knew anything about history knew there was always scary shit going on. It was now just being blasted at you around the clock by perversely incented people and companies paid to do so, recycling whatever stories generate the most fear and outrage every hour and destroying civilization in the process.”

“And the riders were made of stone. And they were made of metal. And they were made of wood. And they were made of flesh and blood. And they were made of trillions and trillions of combinations of electrons and protons and neutrons, which were made of quarks and gluons, which were both particles and waves and either so elementary to be nothing but expressions in fields at the rock bottom of reality, or made of something so small and fundamental to be not yet understood by ‘great’ apes who learned to build rockets and launched themselves into the sun, which through the process of thermonuclear fusion combined the quarks and the electrons and the protons and the neutrons into all manner of matter and scattered it to the ends of the known universe via supernovas so spectacular and yet so unsurprising, an inevitable endpoint of following a set of equations that could be written on a single page. And they were made of stardust. And they were made of nothing at all.”

“Some kinds of knowledge were like one-way doors; despite humans’ immense capacity for cognitive dissonance, some things were impossible to unlearn, even with recent advancements in neuroscience.”

“Darwin thought of that riddle about how you can only run halfway into the woods because then you’re running out. Maybe life was the same, and he had passed the halfway point. Maybe it wasn’t an accident that our greatest aspirations and nightly outrageous fantasies shared the same word: dreams.”

“…self-reported subjective anecdotes aren’t exactly reliable, especially when people are primed to believe something beforehand. We’re notoriously bad witnesses of our own experiences…”

“Besides, what good was knowing where you were if you didn’t know where you were from or going?”

“The secret to life was properly managing your own expectations.”

“The technology underlying the modern internet was almost unfathomable, indistinguishable from magic.”

“You’ll never make the news if you waste all your time watching it.”

“It’s 2020, and everything is fucked.”

“Hate and love were each powerful motivators on their own, but together they provided an endless source of energy.”

“The important thing to remember when talking to a venture capitalist is that they’re in an industry where they only need to be right ten percent of the time.”

“Very few people who study the relevant subject matter like neuroscience or physics — even philosophy — are ‘metaphysical libertarians,’ or those who believe in what most people think of as free will. It’s a fitting name because it’s basically a prerequisite for being a political libertarian, and like political libertarians, they haven’t really thought it through.”

“How bewildering to not know someone’s name, to not know anything about them, but be absolutely sure you loved them.”

If you like these quotes and are interested in a full book about these themes, Circadian Algorithms is now available on Amazon.