“As the components of your life are stripped away, after all the ambitions and hopes vaporize, you reach a self-reflective starkness-- the repetitious plucking of a single overwound string.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“Perhaps the price of comfort is that life passes more rapidly. But for anyone who has lived in uneasiness, even for a short, memorable duration, it's a trade-off that will gladly be made.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“My last chance had vanished into itself like a snail coiling up into his shell.
Insidiously I had lost my grip, and now this was it. I thought all this without much emotion. I really didn't care anymore. I couldn't hang on anymore. I didn't have the guts to kill myself, but I didn't want it to continue. I walked a couple of blocks, empty, listless, and wished I could cry.
...The diabolic hope, the purposeful pulsing of blood, the flight into coherence allowed for some rationalizing an afterlife. A new theology was evolving, one that had a faith-in-death clause. It was evolved when I kicked a dead waterbug on the pavement. It was dried out, hollowed, emptied, like some kind of shell. Maybe, I thought, its body is a shell, maybe all bodies are shells. We hatch and die. Our spirit or something like that is the yoke: it lives the real life, the true life.
It wasn't comforting.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“Some of the more industrious ones were washing the windshields of cars that had been trapped by the red light. I used to see them from inside cars and think they brought it on themselves, and they probably did but now it didn't make a difference. I went over to the fire and warmed my hands with the group. I looked at their faces: idiots, criminals, retards, schizophrenics, paranoids, rejects, fuck-ups, broken-down failures. Alone, once children, never asked to be put on this earth, they ended up as jurors. Their lives were the verdict: the system, the man, something had failed.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“When I was in my teens, I made an appraisal of how comfortable my life could turn out when I became the age I am now. Because of a mechanical failure, the prediction was inexact.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“In Brooklyn I am content, the closest we can come to a sustained happiness.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“Once, as a teenager, I had believed that people could change themselves. Finally I realized that all one could ever hope was understanding one's filthy self better.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
“I had grazed along the surface of her actions and made deep judgments. Rejecting someone because you couldn't understand their love, that was a new one. The more I thought about it the longer the shadow of doubt stretched over all my conclusions. More often than not, things were as they seemed. But as I stared at her, she wasn't as bad looking as I had once thought. I realized how all this time I had seen her the wrong way, and how one's character affects one's appearance. Although she wasn't my type she was attractive. As I thought about her - the vulnerable intelligence, the violent honesty, and the fact that in the entire city she was the only one who took me in and fed me - she became more and more irresistible. Baited by an obscure beauty, trapped by an intense sorrow - all prior definitions had been overruled: this was love.”
― Arthur Nersesian, quote from The Fuck-Up
Arthur Nersesian
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“I don't want you to ever be touched by the gray areas I'm immersed in, baby. I want you clean. I want you to shine, just like you always do.”
― Maya Banks, quote from Burn
“The fantasy I had in my head of how things would turn out was just that; a fantasy.”
― Natasha Preston, quote from Silence
“Seldon, Hari—It is customary to think of Hari Seldon only in connection with psychohistory, to see him only as Mathematics and as social change personified. There is no doubt that he himself
Encouraged this for at no time in his formal writings did he give any hint as to how he came to solve the various problems of
Psychohistory. His leaps of thought might have all been plucked From
Air, for all he tells us. Nor does he tell us of the blind alleys
Into which he crept or the wrong turnings he may have made.
…As for his private life, it is a blank. Concerning his parent and Siblings,
We know a handful of factors, nor more. His only son,
Raych Seldon, is known to have been adopted, but how that
Came about is not known. Concerning his wife, we only
Know that she existed. Clearly, Seldon wanted to a cipher
Except where psychohistory was concerned. It is as though he felt--
Or wanted it to be felt—that he did not live, he merely psychohistorified.”
― Isaac Asimov, quote from Prelude to Foundation
“She read books as one would breathe air, to fill up and live.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from The Living
“Thunderstorms were common in Sarantium on midsummer nights, sufficiently so to make plausible the oft-repeated tale that the Emperor Apius passed to the god in the midst of a towering storm, with lightning flashing and rolls of thunder besieging the Holy City. Even Pertennius of Eubulus, writing only twenty years after, told the story this way, adding a statue of the Emperor toppling before the bronze gates to the Imperial Precinct and an oak tree split asunder just outside the landward walls. Writers of history often seek the dramatic over the truth. It is a failing of the profession.”
― Guy Gavriel Kay, quote from Sailing to Sarantium
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