My Favorite Quotes From Mind Painter
About Civilization (and its collapse)
“A society’s technological dependence increases exponentially over time, as does its helplessness when deprived of it.”
“There was no need to burn our ships upon arrival, like the explorers of old, to ensure the crew’s dedication to the mission. Instead, we’d burned our home.”
“…a true utopia would have a one hundred percent suicide rate, where everyone dies precisely when and how they wish.”
“Tragically ironic, isn’t it? How nuclear weapons represent both our species’ mastery over the very foundations of nature, as well as our utter inability to master our most primitive instincts.”
“Would intelligent life evolve again on this planet, and if so would it have the means — like opposable thumbs or a way to store knowledge outside of brains — to build technology? Dolphins could have lived for eternity and never developed the capability to annihilate their species or the world, much less colonize another.”
“We stood on the shoulders of giants, but we fell off.”
“Theoretically the only tool you really needed to survive was a gun; everything else could be taken from others who lacked one.”
“There were many slippery slopes to nihilism in this new world, and the higher up you were the easier it was to fall down one of them.”
(Dark) Humor
“So, this is how the world ends, eh? Not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a disgusting gurgling sound, he thought.”
“Chad was a twenty-six-year-old former developer of software used to develop more advanced software. He was now unemployed.”
“The story of Noah’s Ark, if you’re familiar, left out the part where the animal kingdom is repopulated entirely through rampant incest.”
“A fate worse than death, in that it also included death at the end.”
“Like no small number of wealthy people he’d taken up an antiquated form of transportation as a hobby.”
“The lights went down in the city, an artificial sun shining on the bay.”
About Life
“He’d been younger then, when sex meant both nothing and everything.”
“I used to wish I’d have nightmares — what a pleasure it would have been to wake up. If all your dreams are terrifying, reality actually becomes something to look forward to.”
“…life is a war we all lose in the end, but every day is a battle, and you can sure as hell win some of those.”
“But the surest way to live a worthwhile, meaningful life was to have already done so, those moments etched forever into the fabric of spacetime.”
“A not-so-subtle reminder that anyone can lose everything at any time, though few think it will happen to them and none get the chance to realize it did when it does.”
“How spectacularly things shine when viewed from the darkness…”
About the Mind
“…how can someone who may be losing his mind accurately assess his own sanity?”
“There’s nothing quite so terrifying as being unsure of your own sanity. All other concerns are downstream.”
“Once upon a time the only thing that couldn’t be taken from someone under any circumstances was their own attitude and thoughts. A sufficiently trained and powerful mind could always take refuge in itself. But Keli knew all too well this was no longer the case; when you strip away the layers of abstraction we’re merely chemical reactions and electric pulses, both of which can be manipulated.”
“But at this point I know I’m only remembering the last time I remembered, an increasingly distorted recursion reaching back in time.”
About the Universe
“With a fixed amount of matter and energy in the universe, everything is a zero-sum game on some level.”
“The electrified gas creating these vibrant displays was a distinct and oft-forgotten fourth phase of matter — plasma — that comprised more of the universe than all but matter’s fifth phase: dark.”
“There’s a brute fact at the end of every chain of causality. Some are just harder to accept than others. If you keep asking ‘why’ in any domain you eventually arrive at something that just seems to be true about reality, at least insofar as we understand it.”
If you like these quotes and are interested in a full book about these themes, my debut sci-fi novel Mind Painter is available on Amazon.
