Musings

Once an unlikely occurrence is incorporated into the story of a life, or a death, it becomes almost impossible to see the alternative possibilities that once existed.

We confer meaning to control our existence. It makes life liveable. The alternative is frightening. Randomness is banal. It diminishes us. But the truth is we resist meaning almost as often as we insist upon it.

~The Premonitions Bureau, Sam Knight

“Every time the DJ drops a new track, it feels louder than anything else that you’ve heard before, which is actually not the case! What happens is you drop a new track, and then over the course of three to five minutes, you make it ever so slightly quieter. And then the new track comes in and it’s back at the level where the original one started, and then everything feels so loud.”

Tom Holkenborg

“She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.”

~Pattern Recognition, William Gibson

Pretty soon it would all be happening at the speed of thought, before it could actually happen, so that nothing would ever have to happen again.

You’d only think things had happened, and if anything ever did happen, you wouldn’t know the difference.

~Synners, Pat Cadigan