The command to be free is a double bind
The beautiful statue of Ganymede and the eagle looked like they had been molded out of white ceramic, and in Ganymede's outstretched arms it seemed to me a whole world was being embraced, a rushing wo...
The Americans lost all the battles but won the war. Because when they lost they were still here. It was their home. They would go off and regroup, and the British would follow them and beat on them ag...
Strange how one remembered faces until you tried to look at them in your mind, when they turned away from you.
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,...
Something to consider: going as fast as we are, if we flew right into the outer layers of the sun, we might emerge again from the sun before there was time for us to heat and burn up. That would creat...
So now I’m popular? Freya says. They hate me, and I hit someone, and now they like me?
So it’s still New York. People can’t give up on it. It’s what economists used to call the tyranny of sunk costs: once you’ve put so much time and money into a project, it gets hard to just eat your lo...
Ship, are you conscious now? My speaking establishes a subject position that might be conscious.
Sheer dumb sentience.
Scared of her, solicitous of her, in love with her—she had seen all that. And shouting at her furiously for some small treachery, or for nothing at all; she had certainly seen that too. Because he had...
Possibly this formulation itself is the deep diagnostic of all human cognition—the tell, as they say, meaning the thing that tells, the giveaway. In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if...
One sign of a good action is that in retrospect it appears inevitable.
Odd how a few sticks of furniture hung around like that. It made her feel better to see them. They would unpack, deploy the furniture, use it until it became invisible. Habit would once again cloak th...
Not that it would be wasting my time to chat in a bar with a good-looking woman, obviously, but I wanted to know as much as possible going in, because under the impact of a woman’s direct gaze I am li...
No one knows anything. But I know less than that, because I thought I knew something, but it was wrong. So I know negatively. I unknow.
No happiness but in virtue. No, that wasn't true. Each part of the triune brain has its own happiness. Lizard in the sun, mammal on the hunt, human doing something good. What's good is good for the la...
Memory is a haunting.
Maybe this was the way it had always happened, with no fate ever involved; you simply fell in with the people around you, and no matter what else happened in history or the great world, for the indivi...
Maybe that’s what a marriage is, Mqaret said. Whistling together. Some kind of performance. I mean, not just a conversation, but a performance.