Datum: At least one-third of ancient rulers’ seers and magicians were in fact fired or killed early in their tenure because it emerged that the bulk of what they foresaw or intuited was irrelevant. Not incorrect, just irrelevant, pointless.
Over half the admits to psych wards are things like cheerleaders who swallow two bottles of Mydol over a high-school breakup or gray lonely asexual depressing people rendered inconsolable by the death of a pet. The cathartic trauma of actually going in somewhere.
His hands were no bigger than a four-year-old girl’s. It was surreal. This massive authoritative figure, with a huge red meaty face and thick walrus mustache and dewlaps and a neck that spilled over the rim of his shirt-collar, and his hands were tiny and pink and hairless and butt-soft, delicate as shells. The hands were the capper. I barely made it out of the office before it started.
I fully grant that mysterious invisible room-cleaning is in a way great, every true slob’s fantasy, somebody materializing and deslobbing your room and then dematerializing – like having a mom without the guilt.
Two dry mouths bumping at each other, trying to kiss, his self-conscious thoughts twisting around on themselves like a snake on a stick while he bucked and snorted dryly above her, his swollen eyes red and his face sagging so that its slack folds maybe touched, limply, the folds of her own loose sagging face as it sloshed back and forth on his pillow, its mouth working dryly. The thought was repellent.
It’d be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.
Another thing he laid in when he’d committed himself to one last marijuana vacation was petroleum jelly.
It’s the digitals. Leith has that word he uses for the shift from analogs to digitals. That word he uses about eleven times an hour.
Seminal.” He keeps saying it. “Seminal, seminal.
The far north of Manitoba. Forbidding wastelands. The center of nothing.
We may say, roughly, that a mathematical idea is ‘significant’ if it can be connected, in a natural and illuminating way, with a large complex of other mathematical ideas. Thus a serious mathematical theorem, a theorem which connects significant ideas, is likely to lead to important advances in mathematics itself and even in other sciences.
Naturally, the significant results that legitimize a mathematical theory take time to derive, and then even more time to be fully accepted, and of course throughout this time the Insanity-v.-Genius question remains undecided, probably even for the mathematician himself, so that he’s developing his theory and cooking his proofs under conditions of enormous personal stress and doubt, and sometimes isn’t even vindicated in his own lifetime, etc.
Hal says, ‘In a nutshell, what we’re talking about here is loneliness.
On one level my attention was intently focused on her voice and story. On another level I – it was if my mind was having a garage sale.
Madame Psychosis’ name was in reality Lucille Duquette, and the Daddy’s name either Earl or Al Duquette of extreme southeast KY, way down near TN and VA.
My aunt asks again if I’m sure it’s no problem and I don’t answer because I’m afraid of how my voice will sound.
Jim’s internal life was to Orin a black hole, Orin said, his father’s face any room’s fifth wall.
Things get very abstract. The concrete room was the sum of abstract facts. Are facts abstract, or are they just abstract representations of concrete things?
There was something almost unbearably touching about a bald spot on a handicapped man.
The fake ring and fictional spouse. It’s like you’re inventing somebody you love just to seduce somebody else into helping you betray her. What’s it like. It’s like suborning somebody into you desecrate a tomb they don’t know is empty.