The Communists are baffled and irritated, because they have finally achieved their perfect society, but only by the help of a God in whom they don’t want to believe. The meritocrats are abashed that they’re stuck for eternity in an incentiveless system with a bunch of pinkos. The conservatives have no penniless to disparage; the liberals have no downtrodden to promote. (Location 64)
So God sits on the edge of Her bed and weeps at night, because the only thing everyone can agree upon is that they’re all in Hell. (Location 67)
The missing crowds make you lonely. You begin to complain about all the people you could be meeting. But no one listens or sympathizes with you, because this is precisely what you chose when you were alive. (Location 88)
Tags: crowds
Note: .crowds we need other people to create that which we cant. We need the crowds
...you cannot appreciate the destination without knowing the starting point; you cannot revel in the simplicity unless you remember the alternatives. (Location 109)
Tags: destination, relative
Note: .relative everything is relative. You need to know one extreme to appreciate the other
And God consoles Himself with the thought that all creation necessarily ends in this: Creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought. (Location 193)
There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time. (Location 229)
Tags: legacy, mortality, favorite
Note: The final death is wen your name is spoken for the last time
Tragically, many people leave just as their loved ones arrive, since the loved ones were the only ones doing the remembering. We all wag our heads at that typical timing. (Location 236)
Tags: family, mortality
since we live in the heads of those who remember us, we lose control of our lives and become who they want us to be. (Location 250)
Tags: legacy, death
Note: .death
However, they overlooked a problem: to build a machine smarter than you, it has to be more complex than you—and the ability to understand the machine begins to slip away. (Location 298)
Tags: ai
Note: .ai
everything that creates itself upon the backs of smaller scales will by those same scales be consumed. (Location 328)
“It is not the brave who can handle the big face, it is the brave who can handle its absence.” (Location 397)
Tags: brave
Note: .brave
“Your fantasies have cursed your realities,” He explains, wringing His hands. “The Company offered you no evidence that it would work; why did you believe them?” Although He doesn’t say it, everyone knows what He’s thinking when He retires to His bed at night: that one of His best gifts—the ability to have faith in an unseen hereafter—has backfired. (Location 431)
People come to discover that the end of death is the death of motivation. Too much life, it turns out, is the opiate of the masses. There is a noticeable decline in accomplishment. People take more naps. There’s no great rush. (Location 496)
Tags: motivation, death
Note: .death without death people lose motivation. They have infinite time yo achieve any goals
“I came here for the same reason doctors wear uniforms of long white coats,” He answers. “They don’t do it for their benefit, but for yours.” (Location 531)
Tags: uniform, doctors, favorite
In theory, you could choose to watch anything: the private activities of single people in their apartments, the unfolding plans of saboteurs, the detailed progress of battlefields. But, instead, we all watch for one thing: evidence of our residual influence in the world, the ripples left in our wake. (Location 608)
Tags: death, legacy
Note: .legacy .death we are most interested in our lasting effect on the world
With a death switch, the computer prompts you for your password once a week to make sure you are still alive. When you don’t enter your password for some period of time, the computer deduces you are dead, and your password is automatically emailed to the second-in-command. (Location 675)
Tags: death, deathswitch
God finally landed on an ingenious solution while watching light diffract through a prism. So when you arrive here, you are split into your multiple selves at all possible ages. The you that existed as a single identity is now all ages at once. These pieces of you no longer get older but remain ageless into perpetuity. The yous have transcended time. (Location 743)
When soldiers part ways at war’s end, the breakup of the platoon triggers the same emotion as the death of a person—it is the final bloodless death of the war. This same mood haunts actors on the drop of the final curtain: after months of working together, something greater than themselves has just died. (Location 767)
Tags: image
Note: .image soldiers parting ways at the end of a war
We were planted here by the Cartographers, whose holy books are what we would recognize as maps. Our calling is to cover every inch of the planet’s surface. As we roam, we vacuum data into our sensory organs, and it is for this reason only that we exist. (Location 918)
Tags: maps
Despite their planetary coverage and long life spans, the mobile cameras collect very little that is useful for cartography. Instead, the devices turn their ingeniously created compact lenses directly into the gazes of other compact lenses—an ironic way to trivialize the technology. (Location 938)
Day after day, with sinking hearts, the Cartographers scroll through endless reels of useless data. The head engineer is fired. He has created an engineering marvel that only takes pictures of itself. (Location 943)
This puts God in a tricky situation. Ancient books relate how God unleashed all His wonders on Egypt. He feels a little defensive now, because He doesn’t have any more wonders to unleash, and He’s increasingly concerned that we would see the strings if He tried. He’s in the position of an amateur magician who performs for small children and suddenly has to play to skeptical adults. All this is reflected in the steady decline of attempted miracles in the past millennia. He is too noble to rely on bluffing, and the thought of being caught and revealed as an amateur embarrasses Him. This is why God has increasingly kept a professional distance from His favorite species. As He grew more withdrawn, saints and martyrs filled the vacuum as His marketing team. He’s ashamed now that He didn’t put a stop to them earlier; instead, he slipped into seclusion as they generated endless chronicles. (Location 964)
Tags: miracles, favorite, god
Note: .god god doesnt do any more miracles as we would be able to understand how theyre done now
But you have a painful surprise in store. You discover that your memory has spent a lifetime manufacturing small myths to keep your life story consistent with who you thought you were. You have committed to a coherent narrative, misremembering little details and decisions and sequences of events. On the way back, the cloth of that story line unravels. Reversing through the corridors of your life, you are battered and bruised in the collisions between reminiscence and reality. By the time you enter the womb again, you understand as little about yourself as you did your first time here. (Location 1154)