anathem

“Nothing is more important than that you see and love the beauty that is right in front of you, or else you will have no defense against the ugliness that will hem you in and come at you in so many ways.”

“If you can’t test it, it’s not theorics – it’s metatheorics. A branch of philosophy. So, if you want to think of it this way, our test equipment is what defines the boundary separating theorics from philosophy.”

“The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them.”

“It happened all the time that the compromise between two perfectly rational alternatives was something that made no sense at all.”

“‘But how can you not be fascinated by –’
‘I am fascinated,’ I insisted. ‘That’s the problem. I am suffering from fascination burnout. Of all the things that are fascinating, I have to choose just one or two’.”

– Anathem by Neal Stephenson