Quotes from 2024

Easy’s fast, and hard takes all the time.

An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances.

When people posit disability as a problem, they look for solutions. Disabled people can and do have problems, which sometimes include pain and dysfunction. However, many of our problems are social, structural, and practical problems that stem from the idea that disabled people are fundamentally flawed, unworthy of inclusion, broken, or inadequate. This is ableist thinking. We have to resist these kinds of assumptions, which produce simplistic disability stories that collapse disabled people into stereotypes.

This I learned, meatbag, this and nothing more: when air, food, and shelter are assured, only two things matter. Work and companionship. To be alone and without purpose is to be the living dead.

You have only small and seemingly pointless choices available to you. But if there is anything I have been trying to teach you, it is that small actions can have larger consequences. If one has only small choices available, one must be patient, and canny.

A goal without a plan is just a wish.

‘What?’ they’d say. ‘You don’t want this unpleasant circumstance we’re forcing on you? Then you’re obviously in favour of this absurdly exaggerated opposite we’ve just invented.’

The need for personal glory is like cigarette addiction: a habit that feels life-sustaining even as it kills you.

But my problem is the same one had by everyone who gathers information: What to do with it? How to sort and shape and use it? How to keep from drowning in it? Not every story needs to be told.

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.

Mysteries that are destroyed by measurement were never truly mysterious; only our ignorance made them seem so. They are like whodunits after you know who did it. Does anyone reread a murder mystery? Whereas the cosmos has been mysterious to humans since long before we knew anything about astronomy or space—and, now that we do, is only more so.

The belly craves food, she thinks, The tongue craves water, The heart craves love, and The mind craves stories.

Creation never ceased on the sixth evening, it occurs to the young man. Creation unfolds around us, despite us and through us at the speed of days and nights. And we call it love.

So little is actually worthy of either belief or disbelief. Better to strive to co-exist, than seek to disprove…

For most digital-age writers, writing is rewriting. We grope, cut, block, paste and twitch, panning for gold onscreen by deleting bucket-loads of crap. Our analogue ancestors had to polish every line mentally before hammering it out mechanically. Rewrites cost them months, metres of ink-ribbon and pints of Tipp-Ex. Poor sods. On the other hand, if digital technology is so superior a midwife of the novel, where are this century’s masterpieces?

Nobody reads advertising. People read what interests them, and sometimes it’s an ad.

There are two meta lessons after twenty years that keep coming up. Word of mouth is unreasonably effective. You get what you do.

It doesn't matter how good your engineering team is if they are not given something worthwhile to build.

Wakefulness or enlightenment can be reasonably defined as appreciating the mystery of life in the present moment, while knowing it is the only 'thing' there is. Wakefulness’ opposite – the dissatisfaction brought about by reactive emotions and alienating desire – can be reasonably defined as the futile attempt to ‘get something out of life.’

It was something he’d seen plenty of times in his job, the way that kind of mindset worked, spiralling inwards into itself. Until at some point, the necessity of doing bad things for a good cause became, by the inexorable ratchet of cognitive dissonance, the insistence that doing things the bad way was a virtue in itself. Because otherwise how could one justify all the bad things already done?

The problem was precision, perfection; the problem was digitization, which sucked the life out of everything that got smeared through its microscopic mesh. Film, photography, music: dead. An aesthetic holocaust!

To the privileged, equality feels like a step down. Understand this and you understand a lot of populist politics today.

People like to get angry about anything. A lot of the time they’re just looking for an excuse. I feel sorry for them. I think for a lot of people … there’s nothing much going on in their lives. Emotionally. I mean, maybe their marriages have dried up, or everything they do has become a kind of habit, I don’t know. But they don’t feel much. No emotional stimulation. We all need to feel things, don’t we? So, when something makes you angry, at least you’re feeling something. You get that emotional kick.’

Since his first waking, he’d found twenty-second-century technology easy to work. User interfaces seemed to have settled down to common standards some time before he’d been frozen. Even the language had stabilised, more or less, if not the accents; English was spoken across several worlds now and had to stay comprehensible to everybody, and there was a huge mass of recorded culture, all of which tended to keep the language static. The vehicles and vocabularies of the year 2166 were easy. It was the people he couldn’t figure out.

She had once read in a book about consciousness that over the years, the human brain makes an AI version of your loved ones. The brain collects data, and within your brain, you host a virtual version of that person. Upon the person’s death, your brain still believes the virtual person exists, because, in a sense, the person still does. After a while, though, the memory fades, and each year, you are left with an increasingly diminished version of the AI you had made when the person was alive.