Strange to consider that these two linguistic operations, metaphor and analogy, so often linked together in rhetoric and narratology, and considered to be variants of the same operation, are actually...
Some people get lucky and partner up with someone the same age, they know the same songs, have the same references and all that, good for them! But for the rest of us it’s catch-as-catch-can.
Ramona was willing to talk about anything, now, about things beyond the present moment. Childhoods in El Modena and at the beach. The boats offshore. Their work. The people they knew. The huge rocks j...
Perhaps there is a provisional solution to this epistemological mess, which is to be located in the phrase it is as if. This phrase is of course precisely the announcement of an analogy. And on reflec...
Now he stood in the farthest end of the cave, in front of the great lion chase he had watched Thorn paint so long ago. He saw again: it was by far the greatest painting in the the cave, maybe the worl...
No one cares about books, that’s why you can write anything you want in them.
Make up a recipe for a successful revolution.Take large masses of injustice, resentment and frustration. Put them in a week or failing hegemon. Sir in misery for a generation or two, until the heat ri...
Language is but a huge set of false analogies. There has to be a better way to make a point.
I’m told finance doesn’t require very complicated math. One guy told me that if you just designed a clean data display, people were amazed. So it’s more just advanced programming,
It was winter here, as if they were in Patagonia or New Zealand, and the light from the sunspot on the sunline smeared so that shadows blurred at the edges, and the air looked rusty.
It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.
It was a whiny culture, we were finding.
It takes courage to keep love at the center when you know just as well as anyone else the real state of things! It’s easy to get angry, anyone can do that. It’s making good that’s the hard part, it’s...
I guess you’ll have to try to do something with F’s moon now. Presumably it’s dead. Or even try E. He looked up at it, big in the blue sky. Well, no. It’s too big. Too heavy. Two minutes later: Maybe...
He did not want to be struck by her again. Or worse, denied her company.
Every ideal and value seemed to melt under a drenching of money, the universal solvent. Money money money. The fake fungibility of money, the pretense that you could buy meaning, buy life.
Domesticating the ant was no easy matter. The little red scientists had not even believed such creatures were possible, because of surface area-to-volume constraints, but there they were, clumping aro...
Destruction is creation. Become as a little child. Language as space, a kind of mathematical notation, geometric locations in the lab of memory. Reading. Maps. Codes, substitutions, the secret names o...
Dent recognized it; the intermezzo before the last movement of De Bruik’s Human Biology. The finale of the symphony was a standard concert opener in the outer worlds. Soon the crackling of superamplif...
But to say self-interest is all that exists, or that it should be given free rein! My Lord. Believe that and nothing matters but money.