The unconscious system of guidance is millions of years old, speech less than a hundred thousand. The brain had no idea any of this was coming. The unconscious must have had to do all sorts of scrambling around to accommodate a system that proved perfectly relentless. Not only it is comparable to a parasitic invasion, it’s not comparable to anything else.
I’m not sure what the adaptive advantage could be to share an innate and collective misery.
It’s certainly possible that the imaginary is best. Like a painting of some idyllic landscape. The place you would most like to be. That you never will.
I had trouble with the God thing. A lot of people do.
They motored out past the pilings, dark with pitch and trailing a green scurf in the claycolored water.
My life is ghastly.
If mathematical objects exist independently of human thought what else are they independent of? The universe, I suppose. When you solve a problem there is always the compelling sense that the solution was there and that you have discovered it.
When they brought Blevins back he sat in the corner and didnt speak. John Grady talked with the old man. His name was Orlando. He didnt know what crime he was accused of. He’d been told he could go when he signed the papers but he couldnt read the papers and no one would read them to him. He didnt know how long he’d been here. Since sometime in the winter. While they were talking the guards came again and the old man shut up.
It’s not so much that I don’t believe in it. I don’t subscribe to its nomination. If fate is the law then is fate also subject to that law? At some point we cannot escape naming responsibility.
You ever think what it would be like to meet a person you’ve known for a long time for the first time in these later years? To meet them anew. You’re thinking they would be a much different person to you if you didn’t know their history.
When people want to be reimbursed for their pain they seldom are.
For whoever makes a shelter of reeds and hides has joined his spirit to the common destiny of creatures and he will subside back into the primal mud with scarcely a cry.
Odd the way the world is. How you can have just about anything except what you want.
My railings against the platonists are a thing of the past. Assuming at last that one could, what would be the advantage of ignoring the transcendent nature of mathematical truths. There is nothing else that all men are compelled to agree upon, and when the last light in the last eye fades to black and takes all speculation with it forever I think it could even be that these truths will glow for just a moment in the final light. Before the dark and the cold claim everything.
Out of their anterior lives they had arrived at the same understanding as their fathers before them. That movement itself is a form of property.
Suppose you was someplace that you didnt know where it was. The real thing you wouldnt know was where someplace else was. Or how far it was. It wouldnt change nothin about where you was at.
He walked out on the prairie and stood holding his hat like some supplicant to the darkness over them all and he stood there for a long time.
She wanted to disappear. Well, that’s not quite right. She wanted not to have ever been here in the first place.
Did I kill a lot of people? I been asked that question a few times. But never before by a man. I told this one girl I was seeing that yes I had killed a bunch of gooks but that I hadnt eaten any of them.
There’s no way to answer that question. My friend John maintains that if things are going reasonably well it’s all your own doing and if not then it’s all bad luck.