▤ in progress | ✩ finished

• packing for mars, mary roach ✩
  • "you are unpredictable. you are inconstant. you take weeks to fix."
  • " . . . i began to rage inwardly and the very traits. . . which in the beginning had struck me as admirable, ultimately seemed to me detestable. the time came when i could no longer bear the sight of this man who was unfailingly kind to me. the calm which i had once admired i now called laziness, the philosophic imperturbability became in my eyes insensitiveness. the meticulous organization of his existence was maniacal old-manliness. i could have murdered him."
  • " the moment when 'one has nothing left to reveal to the other, when even his unformed thoughts can be anticipated, his pet ideas become a meaningless drool, and the way he blows out a pressure lamp or drops his boots on the floor or eats his food becomes a rasping annoyance. ' "
  • the break-away effect: a feeling that isn't one of panic, but of euphoria. "i feel like i have broken the bonds from the terrestrial sphere."
  • gravity maps of earth were once top-secret cold war possessions.
  • landing vertigo / Earth sickness
  • " the act of vomiting is an orchestral event of the gut, complex and seamlessly coordinated: 'there is a forced inspiration, the diaphragm descends, the abdominal muscles contract, the duodenum contracts, the cardia and oesophagus relaxes, the glottis closes, the larynx is drawn forward, the soft palate rises, and the mouth opens.' "
    • the "emetic brain" or "vomiting center".
  • " because human beings have this amazing tool called intuition, where they've built up this catalogue of experiences and they can draw on it instantaneously— "

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• neuromancer, william gibson ✩
  • " ... one of those strange instants of silence descended, as though a hundred unrelated conversations had simultaneously arrived at the same pause."
  • " ... all his bitterness suddenly rising in him like bile... "
  • " he'd watched her personality fragment, calving like an iceberg, splinters drifting away, and finally he'd seen the raw need, the hungry armature of addiction. "
  • " 'no,' zone said at last, his smooth forehead creased to indicate the effort it cost him to recall so much pointless detail. "
  • " when the fear came, it was like some half-forgotten friend. not the cold, rapid mechanism of the dex-paranoia, but simple animal fear. he'd lived for so long on a constant edge of anxiety that he'd almost forgotten what real fear was. "
  • "The drug hit him like an express train, a white-hot column of light mounting his spine from the region of his prostate, illuminating the sutures of his skull with x-rays of short-circuited sexual energy. His teeth sang in their individual sockets like turning forks, each one pitch-perfect and clear as ehthanol. His bones, beneath the hazy envelope of flesh, were chromed and polished, the joints lubricated with a film of silicone. Sand-storms rage across the scoured floor of his skull, generating waves of high thin static that broke behind his eyes, spheres of purest crystal, expanding ... "

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• cut throat, michael slade ▤
  • "a shadow of discomfort crossed declercq's face, which jack mistakenly linked to his revelation. "
  • "dull afternoon light transmogrified the rivulets worming across the windows into a nest of rain-snakes that slithered about the men."

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• exhalation, ted chiang ▤
  • " i was prosperous, but my heart was troubled, and neither the purchase of luxuries nor the giving of alms was able to soothe it. now i stand before you without a single dirham in my purse, but i am at peace. "
  • " he offered an explanation, speaking of his search for tiny pores in the skin of reality, like the holes that worms bore into wood, and how upon finding one he was able to expand and stretch it the way a glassblower turns a dollop of molten glass into a long-necked pipe, and how he then allowed time to flow like water at one mouth while causing it to thicken like syrup at the other. "
  • " what began as a thrift gradually turned into miserliness, and prudent decisions were replaced by tightfisted ones. "
  • "and surely the experience must be similar, for like infernal fire, grief burns but does not consume; instead, it makes the heart vulnerable to further suffering. "
  • " i knew it was foolhardy; men of experience say, "four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity," and i understood the truth of those words better than most. "
  • " grief owes no debt. "
  • " nothing erases the past. there is repentance, there is atonement, and there is forgiveness. that is all, but that is enough. "
  • " we are not really consuming air at all. the amount of air that i draw from each day's new pair of lungs is exactly as much as seeps out through the joints of my limbs and the seams of my casing, exactly as much as i am adding to the atmosphere around me; all i am doing is converting air at high pressure to air at low. with every movement of my body, i contribute to the equalization of pressure in our universe. with every thought that i have, i hasten the arrival of that fatal equilibrium. "
  • nightmarish paroxysm
  • " she likes children just fine, but they're not the standard against which all other accomplishments should be measured. "
  • " here was the line at which the pursuit of truth ceased to be an intrinsic good. "
  • " ... no nucleus around which nostalgia could accrete. "
  • cognitive cyborgs
  • " right now each of us is a private oral culture. we rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. with our memories we are all guilty of a whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves. "
  • " what digital memory will do is change those stories from fabulations that emphasize our best acts and elide our worst, into ones that - i hope - acknowledge our fallibility and make us less judgmental about the fallibility of others. "
  • " ... the hush of the night sky is the silence of a graveyard. "
  • " the only sane response would be despair. "
  • "... there has been exactly one verified miracle - the creation of the universe - and all of us are precisely equidistant from it. "
  • stochastic jitters