It is always the teacher who must learn the most … or else nothing real has happened in the exchange. - Kim Stanley Robinson

No step along the way had seemed more than a little thing; but altogether it came to something rather monstrous.

In the random flux of universal contingency, nothing mattered; and yet, and yet...

And the mind-body connection was so strong—so strong that the distinction itself was probably false, a vestige of Cartesian metaphysics or earlier religious views of the soul. Mind was one body’s life. Memory was mind. And so, by a simple transitive equation, memory equaled life. So that with memory gone, life was gone.