People are made of stories. Our memories are not the impartial accumulation of every second we’ve lived; they’re the narrative that we assembled out of selected moments.

The point is not to prove you were right; the point is to admit you were wrong.

if everyone remembered everything, would our differences get shaved away? What would happen to our sense of self? It seemed to me that a perfect memory couldn’t be a narrative any more than unedited security-cam footage could be a feature film.

The economy goes into a recession after the latest flu pandemic, prompting changes in the virtual worlds.

Set up a rack of billiard balls and execute a flawless break. Imagine the table has no pockets and is frictionless, so the balls just keep rebounding, never coming to a stop; how accurately can you predict the path of any given ball as it collides against the others? In 1978, the physicist Michael Berry calculated that you could predict only nine

As she did at the time, Ana again tries to pin down exactly why nonsexual relationships with animals can be healthy while sexual ones can’t, why the limited consent that animals can give is sufficient to keep them as pets yet not to have sex with them. Again she can’t articulate an argument that isn’t rooted in personal distaste, and she’s not sure

“Coincidence and intention are two sides of a tapestry, my lord. You may find one more agreeable to look at, but you cannot say one is true and the other is false.”

I hope that you were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise from a universe’s exhalation.

At the same time, she knows the difference that affection can make in the training process, how it enables patience when patience is needed most.