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47c5a5a
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When you discover that you are living in a fantasy that cannot endure, a fantasy that will destroy your world, and your children, what do you do? People said things like, Fuck it, or Fuck the future. They said things like, The day is warm, or This meal is excellent, or Let's go to the lake and swim.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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fbf8ec1
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It was a world of acts, and words had no more influence on acts than the sound of a waterfall has on the flow of the stream.
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words
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d914a98
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Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e7a7397
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It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6f8dc68
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In an expanding universe, Spencer had said, order was not really order, but merely the difference between the actual entropy exhibited and the maximum entropy possible.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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35ad4c7
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And so sometimes when you feel strange, when a pang tugs at your heart or it seems like the moment has already happened- or when you look up in the sky and are surprised at the sight of bright Jupiter between clouds, and everything suddenly seems stuffed with a vast significance-consider that some other person somewhere is entangled with you in time, and is trying to give some push to the situation, some little help to make things better. T..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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77d6466
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We are here to inscribe ourselves on the universe, and it is not inappropriate to remind ourselves of this when blank slates are given us.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f2fdddd
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Desire is life trying to continue to be life. All living things desire... Life is wanting.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c891ea6
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Each of us have a gift, you see, given us freely by the universe. And each of us with every breath gives something back
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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61425ab
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And Sarah still looked like the sexiest librarian on earth, which is as those of you who frequent libraries know means very sexy indeed, but with that added owlish touch that drives you wild.
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librarians
sex-appeal
sexy
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e1b7600
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Sometimes I think it's post-scarcity that evil exists. Before that, it could always be put down to want or fear. It was possible to believe, as apparently you did, that when fear and want went away, bad deeds would too. Humanity would be revealed as some kind of bonobo, an altruistic cooperator, a lover of all.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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7126a6a
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Because life is robust, Because life is bigger than equations, stronger than money, stronger than guns and poison and bad zoning policy, stronger than capitalism, Because Mother Nature bats last, and Mother Ocean is strong, and we live inside our mothers forever, and Life is tenacious and you can never kill it, you can never buy it, So Life is going to dive down into your dark pools, Life is going to explode the enclosures and bring back th..
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commons
life
nature
structures-of-power
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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8b55faa
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Sax had always been so uninterested in [power and gain] that it was hard for him to understand why anyone else would be. What was personal gain but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And what was power but the freedom to do what you wanted to do? And once you had that freedom, any more wealth or power actually began to restrict one's options, and reduce one's freedom. One became a servant of one's wealth or power, constrained to spend..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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92f76fe
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Language is but a huge set of false analogies. There has to be a better way to make a point.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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f2d334e
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The command to be free is a double bind
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d9c2862
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Why are we here?' 'To make more love.' 'All right, fair enough. But how do we best love this world Allah gave us? We do it by learning it! [...] If you try to understand things, if you look at the world and say, why does this happen, why do things fall, why does the sun come up every morning and shine on us, and warm the air and fill the leaves with green--how does all this happen? What rules has Allah used to make this beautiful world?--Th..
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knowledge
science
understanding
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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ceb260f
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But no. That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless -- a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most, of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added u..
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obfuscation
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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84cd3c4
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In a capitalist world, the word capital has taken on more and more uses. . . . human capital, for instance, which is what labor accumulates through education and work experience. Human capital differs from the classic kind in that you can't inherit it, and it can only be rented, not bought or sold.
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employment
slavery
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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1b11623
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Every day we wake up into a new world, each sleep causes yet another reincarnation.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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809959d
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Without an observer at a twenty three degree angle to the light being reflected off a cloud of spherical droplets, there is no rainbow. The whole universe is like that. Our spirits stand at a twenty three degree angle to the universe. There is some new thing created at the contact of photon and retina, some space created between rock and mind.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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7e8c936
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Indeed I now think that the Indian and Chinese description of the afterlife, the system of the six lokas or realms of reality - the devas, asuras, humans, beasts, pretas, and inhabitants of hell - is in fact a metaphorical but precise description of this world and the inequalities that exist in it, with the devas sitting in luxury and judgment on the rest, the asuras fighting to keep the devas in their high position, the humans getting by a..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d7c2808
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Looking back down the vale of the ages at the endless recurrence of their reincarnations, before they were forced to drink their vials of forgetting and all became obscure to them again, they could see no pattern at all to their efforts; if the gods had a plan, or even a set of procedures, if the long train of transmigrations was supposed to add up to anything, if it was not just mindless repetition, time itself nothing but a succession of ..
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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255ef65
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And, you know, you never really summon all of your strength until you know that there's no way back, no way to go but onward.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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5b22da7
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We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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c99ab8e
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Beauty is the promise of happiness. And the only happiness is action.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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734507f
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Memory is a haunting.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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9f7ebcf
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Reincarnation is a story we tell; then in the end it's the story itself that is the reincarnation.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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d71cc5f
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If you don't act on it, it wasn't a true feeling
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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09a8ec7
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I know." She sighed. "We'll all say that. We'll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it's all some kind of Siberia or Northwest Territories, and Mars will be gone and we'll be here, and we'll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces."
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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37fbade
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None of us know our real names.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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eaa8d1b
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When obsessives are given their object of desire, what do they feel? It was hard to say, really. In a sense their lives were ending; yet something else, some other life, had finally, finally begun.... Filled with so many emotions at once, it was impossible not to be confused; it was an interference pattern, some feelings cancelled, others reinforced.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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88c9f63
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When Reinhold Messner returned from the first solo climb of Everest, he was severely dehydrated, and utterly exhausted; he fell down most of the last part of the descent, and collapsed on the Rongbuk glacier, and he was crawling over it on hands and knees when the woman who was his entire support team reached him; and he looked up at her out of a delirium, and said, "Where are all my friends?"
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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de133f4
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It was a mistake to speak one's mind at any time, unless it perfectly matched your political purpose; and it never did.
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politics
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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1bd823d
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It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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22cda2a
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We've been paying a fraction of what things really cost to make, but meanwhile the planet, and the workers who made the stuff, take the unpaid costs right in the teeth.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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2ed7b64
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if you program a purpose into a computer program, does that constitute its will? Does it have free will, if a programmer programmed its purpose? Is that programming any different from the way we are programmed by our genes and brains? Is a programmed will a servile will? Is human will a servile will? And is not the servile will the home and source of all feelings of defilement, infection, transgression, and rage?
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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e80a676
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History is humankind trying to get a grip.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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be59367
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Enough is as good as a feast. And it's when everyone is equal that your kids are safest.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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61e8067
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We like to blame life for the problems we make, We threaten to change, but it's always a fake; We bitch and moan that everything's wrong, Then we get right back to getting along.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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311a7e8
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The people are suffering. Relieving people's poverty ought to be handled as though one were rescuing them from fire, or saving them from drowning. One cannot hesitate.
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poverty
suffering
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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6a7e23b
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He pointed to another number, changing as rapidly as the first, but on a lower trajectory; it rose to a high of 8.79 rem per hour. Several lifetimes of dentists' X-rays, to be sure; but the radiation outside the storm shelter would have been a lethal dose, so they were getting off lightly. Still, the amount flying through the rest of the ship! Billions of particles were penetrating the ship and colliding with the atoms of water and metal th..
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science-fiction
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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7c1f141
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If you can't afford housing then the right to vote is a bad joke.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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7dc1017
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no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |
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8e71beb
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In games there are rules, but in life the rules keep changing. You could put your bishop out there to mate the other guy's king, and he could lean down and whisper in your bishop's ear, and suddenly it's playing for him, and moving like a rook. And you're fucked.
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Kim Stanley Robinson |