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Nothing Quotes

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Nothing Quotes

“As Sam came to a panting stop, a jet of orange flame burst from a high window. Several dozen kids were standing, watching. A crowd that struck Sam as very strange, until he realized why it was strange: there were no adults, just kids. “Is anyone in there?” Astrid called out. No one answered. “It could spread,” Sam said. “There’s no 911,” someone pointed out. “If it spreads, it could burn down half the town.” “You see a fireman anywhere?” A helpless shrug. The day care shared a wall with the hardware store, and both were only a narrow alley away from the burning building. Sam figured they had time to get the kids out of the day care if they acted fast, but the hardware store was something they could not afford to lose. There had to be forty kids just standing there gawking. No one seemed about to start doing anything. “Great,” Sam said. He grabbed two kids he sort of knew. “You guys, go to the day care. Tell them to get the littles out of there.” The kids stared at him without moving. “Now. Go. Do it!” he said, and they took off running. Sam pointed at two other kids. “You and you. Go into the hardware store, get the longest hose you can find. Get a spray nozzle, too. I think there’s a spigot in that alley. Start spraying water on the side of the hardware store and up on the roof.” These two also stared blankly. “Dudes: Not tomorrow. Now. Now. Go! Quinn? You better go with them. We want to wet down the hardware—that’s where the wind will take the fire next.” Quinn hesitated. People were not getting this. How could they not see that they had to do something, not just stand around? Sam pushed to the front of the crowd and in a loud voice said, “Hey, listen up, this isn’t the Disney Channel. We can’t just watch this happen. There are no adults. There’s no fire department. We are the fire department.” Edilio was there. He said, “Sam’s right. What do you need, Sam? I’m with you.” “Okay. Quinn? The hoses from the hardware store. Edilio? Let’s get the big hoses from the fire station, hook ’em up to the hydrant.” “They’ll be heavy. I’ll need some strong guys.” “You, you, you, you.” Sam grabbed each person’s shoulder, shaking each one, pushing them into motion. “Come on. You. You. Let’s go!”

“The old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy ... a razor-wire knot daring me to unloop her, and I was not up to the job with my thick, numb, nervous fingers. Country fingers. Flyover fingers untrained in the intricate, dangerous work of 'solving Amy'. When I'd hold up the bloody stumps, she'd sigh and turn to her secret mental notebooks on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting disappointments, frailties, shortcomings.”

“What is wrong with you?” Radu sounded on the verge of tears. “Why do you have to destroy everything good we have here?” “Because,” Lada said, voice flat with the sudden wave of exhaustion pulling her heavily to the ground. “We have nothing. Can you not see that?” “We have Mehmed!” Lada looked up. The stars were static, still and cold in the night, all the fire gone from the sky. “It is not enough,” she said.”

“The PSR gives rise to ontological mathematics, which is just the exploration of all the different ways in which x = 0 can be explored, and x can be any expression at all, provided it can ultimately be reduced to zero. There are infinite mathematical tautologies, all of which are consistent with the PSR and Occam’s razor. Nothing can be simpler in hypothesis than requiring everything to equal zero, and nothing could be richer in phenomena than this strict requirement since there are infinite ways to generate mathematical expressions that equal zero. So, the law of ultimate simplicity leads, inevitably, to endless variety ... all thanks to mathematics and the equals sign. There is no contradiction whatsoever between total simplicity and infinite variety ... that’s exactly why math is so powerful, and can produce the incredibly varied universe we live in ... all of which is simply “nothing” expressed in different ways. Is that not the ultimate miracle? But it’s not a miracle at all. It is the direct consequence of the PSR, hence is the most rational thing of all.”

“I don't know how to feel or think or love. I'm a character in a novel as yet unwritten, hovering in the air and undone before I've even existed, amongst the dreams of someone who never quite managed to breathe life into me. I'm always thinking, always feeling, but my thoughts lack all reason, my emotions all feeling. I'm falling through a trapdoor, through infinite space … in a directionless, empty fall. My soul is a black maelstrom, a great madness spinning about a vacuum, the swirling of a vast ocean around a hole in the void, and in the waters, more like whirlwinds than waters, float images of all I ever saw or heard in the world: houses, faces, books, boxes, snatches of music and fragments of voices, all caught up in a sinister, bottomless whirlpool. And I, myself, am the centre that exists only because the geometry of the abyss demands it; I am the nothing around which all this spins, I exist so that it can spin, I am a centre that exists only because every circle has one.”

“And... well, she had done it. Just as she said she would. She felt nothing - which was good - no, which was great. You could get anything you wanted in this world if you didn't feel. It was just a shame that she couldn't feel happy about it. She would've settled for feeling satisfaction at what she'd done, but feeling nothing at all was better than feeling bad. If that was all there was, then that was all she wanted or needed”

“Learning to pass, it turns out, is less a matter of acting than not acting. You can become part of a given scene, situation, or people ('our people,' as it were), simply by letting yourself serve as a mirror for those around you. When I was still in college, when I still thought I might make a good priest, I spent some time in a Trappist monastery. I found that by exerting as little of my own personality as possible, I was able to fit right in. The monks in no time came to call me brother, believing I was destined to make vows as one of their own. Passing begins with the assumptions of those around you. The best thing you can do to maintain the illusion is to come as close as possible to doing nothing at all.”