“We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.” Bullshit artist in this context meant his mother, but the statement had wide applications.
Quotes from Authority
by Jeff VanderMeer
Quotes from Authority Jeff VanderMeer
There came a distant shout across the river, and an even-more distant reply. Something small snuffled and quorked its way through the reeds to his right. A deep breath of fresh air was limned by a faint but sharp marsh smell. It was the kind of place where he and his father would have gone canoeing when he was a teenager. It wasn’t true wilderness, was comfortingly close to civilization, but existed just enough apart to create a boundary. This was what most people wanted: to be close to but not part of. They didn’t want the fearful unknown of a “pristine wilderness.” They didn’t want a soulless artificial life, either.
In college, what had always stuck him in Astronomy 101 was that the first astronomers to think of points of light not as part of a celestial tapestry revolving around the earth but as individual stars had had to wrench their imaginations—and thus their analogies and metaphors—out of a grooved track that had been running through everyone’s minds for hundreds and hundreds of years.