existential

Carry me like change in your pocket and spend me as you wish.

The question of being is the darkest in all philosophy.

Might it have been nothing but life itself? Life; this limitless complex sea, filled with assorted flotsam, brimming with capricious, violent, and yet eternally transparent blues and greens.

o There__ no way to really preserve a person when they__e gone and that__ because whatever you write down it__ not the truth, it__ just a story. Stories are all we__e ever left with in our head or on paper: clever narratives put together from selected facts, legends, well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles.

I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.

I wondered, as I wondered so often when I was that age, who /I/ was, and what exactly was looking at the face in the mirror. If the face I was looking at wasn't me, and I knew it wasn't, because I would still be me whatever happened to my face, then what /was/ me? And what was watchig?

Imagine the universe is like this cloth._ Philippos said, lifting up an old rag off the ground. __here are thousands of tiny threads woven in tiny, little patterns. If you follow one thread it will lead you to the end, but also you__l see that more threads are connected to it. What if you decide to follow another? Where would that lead you? And if you cut one thread, what would happen to the cloth then? Would it fray until it fell apart? Or would it just change pattern?_ he paused thoughtfully. __ielders like you can see those possibilities. You can follow the threads and see where they begin and end, where and how they connect with everything else and what might happen if something changes along the way.

There was something heartbreakingly beautiful about the lights of distant ships, I thought. It was something that touched both on human achievement and the vastness against which those achievements seemed so frail. It was the same thing whether the lights belonged to a caravel battling the swell on a stormy horizon or a diamond-hulled starship which had just sliced its way through interstellar space.

The sea was no stranger to the rock on the beach. The sea came often to the rock, rushing up wetly against its warm grey, and always as it swept away it took an infinitesimal part of the rock with it. The rock had known the waves for a long time, and learned it was in its nature to erode.

I always thought I wasn't afraid to die. No... no one is afraid of death itself. Your pain and suffering is over in an instant. What really makes me suffer... Is seeing you crying over me... From the darkness of the Milky Way.I'm sorry... Please don't make that face. You look best shdn you're smiling, you know.

I'd come to realize that all our troubles spring from our failure to use plain, clear-cut language.

I want to end my life like a human being: in Intensive Care, high on morphine, surrounded by cripplingly expensive doctors and brutal, relentless life-support machines. Then the corpse can go into orbit__referably around the sun. I don't care how much it costs, just so long as I don't end up party of any fucking natural cycle: carbon, phosphorus, nitrogen. Gaia, I divorce thee. Go suck the nutrients out of someone else, you grasping bitch.