Luo Ji didn’t want to listen, but he was like a candle on a summer night. The words, like insects crowding around the flame, kept working their way into his head:

First, take a look at the final essay question, then start the exam from the top, so that as you work on the exam, your subconscious will be thinking over the essay question, like a background process in a computer.

But it wasn’t a language of this world. It constructed a world that gave it meaning, and only in that rosy world did the words of the language find their corresponding referents.

The turbulence was purposeless, but in huge quantities of purposeless turbulence, purpose took shape.

Mahan’s theory of sea power

Jovian

Without the fear of heights, there can be no appreciation for the beauty of high places.

The past was like a handful of sand you thought you were squeezing tightly, but which had already run out through the cracks between your fingers. Memory was a river that had run dry long ago, leaving only scattered gravel in a lifeless riverbed. He had lived life always looking out for the next thing, and whenever he had gained, he had also lost,

seem to remember a line Yang Wen-li said in Legend of the Galactic Heroes:*11 ‘In