Adam Roberts Quotes

That a human being had died did not distress her. Had it been somebody she knew it would have upset her; she wasn’t a monster. Had it been somebody she cared about. But it was nobody she knew, and it would have been disingenuous to pretend that the death of somebody she didn’t know affected her on an emotional level.

Diana got that seventh-sense intimation that she had touched on an unmentionable matter; although a strangely involuted one whereby the fact that it was unmentionable was itself unmentionable.

She didn’t have to believe the technology existed. She only had to believe that people believed the technology existed. People, being stupid, believed all sorts of things.

The motives that explained human murder bunched, historically, into three groups: material gain; personal grudge and sociopathy.

People-problems did not interest her. Data seemed to her a larger, purer, more transcendent quantity than Homo sapiensness. Human-to-human interactions were, effectively, all just politics, and politics bored her.

She had expected to encounter death as a kind of existential depth and had been disappointed. But maybe there was a deeper truth there. Maybe profundity actually is a mode of disappointment. The rhythm of the climax—joy and despair, sex and pain—is of course the currency of life. Death can only ever be a sort of anticlimactic belatedness.

As far as dreams were concerned—well dreams are generated by the random processes of neural oscillation during the brain’s rest phases. What dreams do is cycle and recycle images and feelings, rationalisations and fears. There’s nothing special about that. It’s not the dreams that matter (chaff, mental turbulence, the rotating metal bars moving endlessly through the transparent tub of metaphorical slushy). It is what the problem-solving circuits in the mind make of the dreams. Dreams iterate and test mental schemas, discarding the maladaptive to return the adaptive to the slush to be reworked. Dreams are emotional preparations for solving problems—that is why we have evolved them, because problem-solving abilities are highly adaptive and thus strongly evolutionarily selected. Dreams intoxicate the individual out of reliance on common sense and preconception, and tempt her into the orbit of private logic. Dreams have utility.

His last hours alive. But he didn’t know!
None of us will know, of course. The weird grammar of death. You die, he or she dies, they die, but there is no genuine form for “I”. Not really. All know that, none know when.

What’s inside the box?
Doubt is there.
What’s another name for doubt?
Death is another name for doubt. Death is what inflects the immortal certainty of the universe’s process with uncertainty.

Jack considered: there were worse things that could happen than him dying. Of course, there were much better things, too.

You're just doing that to pass the time," said Davide, dismissively.
"Just to pass the time," agreed Jac. "Though I suppose time will pass, in any case, regardless of what I do.