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Imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, "This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!" This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. We all know that at some point in the future the Universe will come to an end and at some other point, considerably in advance from that but still not immediately pressing, the sun will explode. We feel there's plenty of time to worry about that, but on the other hand that's a very dangerous thing to say.
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Speech at Digital Biota 2, Cambridge, UK, (1998)

 

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In a day, sometimes I feel so much love for the world, I think my heart is bursting. Sometimes, I feel so scared, I want to shrink myself even further. I think that’s what happened to us gods and goddesses. Like the dinosaurs, we realized that it’s too dangerous to be so large. So we kept shrinking ourselves to what we are now. We might get even smaller. I see the sign in the engineers making smaller gadgets, smaller and smaller. Pretty soon, our fingers will be too large to operate them. So what are we doing? I trust in the human wisdom. We are incredibly intelligent beings. So we might know something without thinking that we know…. Well, even my best friend didn’t know until now that I was thinking of crazy things like this.

 

Yoko Ono

 

I know every numbskull will babble on about "black man," "maneater," "chance," and "retrospective interpretation," in order to banish something terribly inconvenient that might sully the familiar picture of childhood innocence. Ah, these good, efficient, healthy-minded people, they always remind me of those optimistic tadpoles who bask in a puddle in the sun, in the shallowest of waters, crowding together and amiably wriggling their tails, totally unaware that the next morning the puddle will have dried up and left them stranded.

 

Carl Jung

 

I bumped into a woman I hadn't seen for nearly three years. The first thing she said to me? "You've lost a lot of weight since the last time I saw you!"
"Well," I said, slightly nonplussed, "the last time you saw me I'd just had a baby."
What I felt like saying was, "I've produced my third child and my sixth novel since I last saw you. Aren't either of those things more important, more interesting, than my size?" But no — my waist looked smaller! Forget the kid and the book: finally, something to celebrate!

 

J. K. Rowling

 

Faeries might have been wandering around in Victorian England. I can believe that. But it is a more difficult thing to think that they might be wandering around Camden Town now.
It is more of a jump, but I find that more interesting in many ways. The irruption of the supernatural into our world is a much more enticing notion to explore than the same thing happening in some past time, or in a wholly imaginary world.

 

Elizabeth Hand

 

Sometimes it happens that a man's circle of horizon becomes smaller and smaller, and as the radius approaches zero it concentrates on one point. And then that becomes his point of view.

 

David Hilbert