he knew night for what it was: the shadow of the earth itself, cast against the sky.
"Have any of you ever visited Babylon?" Kudda's wife, Alitum, answered, "No, why would we? It's a long climb, and we have all we need here." "You have no desire to actually walk on the earth?" Kudda shrugged. "We live on the road to heaven; all the work that we do is to extend it further. When we leave the tower, we will take the upward ramp, not the downward."
between any reservoirs, which was fortunate indeed. If a sluice
In this manner they could progress the better part of a cubit
No matter what I study, I can see patterns. I see the gestalt, the melody within the notes, in everything: mathematics and science, art and music, psychology and sociology. As I read the texts, I can think only that the authors are plodding along from one point to the next, groping for connections that they can't see. They're like a crowd of people unable to read music, peering at the score for a Bach sonata, trying to explain how one note leads to another. As glorious as these patterns are, they also whet my appetite for more. There are other patterns waiting to be discovered, gestalts of another scale entirely. With respect to those, I'm blind myself; all my sonatas are just isolated data points by comparison. I have no idea what form such gestalts might assume, but that'll come in time. I want to find them, and comprehend them. I want this more than anything I've ever wanted before.
They're hardly fit for speech, let alone thought.
arithmetic as a formal system cannot guarantee that it will not produce results such as "1 = 2"; such contradictions may never have been encountered, but it is impossible to prove that they never will be.
my memories grew like a column of cigarette ash, laid down by the infinitesimal sliver of combustion that was my consciousness, marking the sequential present.
the general sessions." Lord Fieldhurst smiled in an avuncular
Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior, but to Neil it had always seemed too remote to consider, like wealth or fame or glamour.
For most of its inhabitants, Hell is not that different from Earth; its principal punishment is the regret of not having loved God enough when alive, and for many that's easily endured.
a culture-jamming group responsible for numerous acts of media vandalism.
If our lives are tales that Allah tells, then we are the audience as well as the players, and it is by living these tales that we receive their lessons.
whether or not your brain is impelled by the air that once impelled mine, through the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you.
I offer to you a valediction. Contemplate the marvel that is existence, and rejoice that you are able to do so.
"I like singing," volunteers Jax. "Really? Let's have a song, then." Jax doesn't need further encouragement; he launches into one of his favorites, "Mack the Knife" from Threepenny Opera. He knows all the words, but the tune he sings is at best a rough approximation of the actual melody. At the same time he performs an accompanying dance that he choreographed himself, mostly a series of poses and hand gestures borrowed from an Indonesian hip-hop video he likes.
Ana's actually far from confident that this scenario would produce a Turing, but she's practiced this argument enough times to sound like she believes it.