Thought, like any parasite, cannot exist without a compliant host.
BERNARD BECKETTIn the end, living is defined by dying. Book-ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface. Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.
More Bernard Beckett Quotes
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I write with teenagers in mind.
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This is always the problem with building heroes. To keep them pure, we must build them stupid. The world is built on compromise and uncertainty, and such a place is too complex for heroes to flourish.
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In the end, living is defined by dying. Book-ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface. Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.
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I cannot choose to ignore this feeling, of life slowly bleeding out of me. I cannot ignore the fact that life only makes sense to me when I see a smile, or feel another hand in mine.
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Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism.
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And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times.
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I try not to be surprised. Surprise is the public face of a mind that has been closed.
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Unable to attribute misfortune to chance, unable to accept their ultimate insignificance within the greater scheme, the people looked for monsters in their midst.
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Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; its a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.
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Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.
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The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.
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I cant see any great evidence that humans have any ability to access anything other than the material world. Beyond that, who knows, but theres no good evidence that would take me to any particular belief.
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Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.
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The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does.
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The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.
BERNARD BECKETT