Recursion Quotes
"The surrounding skyscrapers of the Upper West Side look mystical in their luminous shrouds of fog."
"All my memories from that life are in shades of gray, like film noir stills. They feel real, but they're haunted, phantom memories."
"This low point isn't the book of your life. It's just a chapter."
"Because memory is everything. Physically speaking, a memory is nothing but a specific combination of neurons firing together."
"Nostalgia is as much an analgesic for him as alcohol."
"Everything seems scarier at night. It's just an illusion. A trick the darkness plays on us."
"The only thing she can compare it to is the remembrance of a very detailed dream."
"The sensory experience of it is what’s killing him."
"Perhaps Vince was right. Maybe it is all happening at once."
"Her room isn’t much—a bed, a dresser, and one window that overlooks the emptiest highway she’s ever seen."
"It eats her up inside to wonder what her parents must make of her disappearance."
"So she comforts herself with the knowledge that every day she remains in this secluded corner of the world, undiscovered by Slade, is a day she keeps the world safe from what she has the potential to create."
"The boredom and purposelessness of her Yukon days had driven her to the brink of depression."
"Everything good. Safe. It was a perfect moment before..."
"And it occurs to her as hot, angry tears run down her face that it was her own self-destructive ambition that carried her to this moment."
"Humans cannot be trusted with technology of such power—with the splitting of the atom came the atomic bomb."
"The ability to change memory, and thereby reality, would be at least that dangerous, in part because it would be so seductive."
"I was prepared to live out the rest of my life under the radar. Or kill myself if Slade ever found me."
"I wanted to help her and others like her. I thought if we could figure out how to capture memories, it would lead us to understanding how to stop them from erasing altogether."
"You’re the only person in the world I can tell this to, but I was given a chance to build my memory chair."
"I brought something awful into the world, Mama. I didn’t mean to, but I did, and now I have to spend the rest of my life in hiding."
"Progress is inevitable. And it’s a force for good."
"The point is, we don’t know what people would do with this knowledge. All we know is that once enough people know about the chair, or how to build it, there’s no going back."
"I’d rather take the chance at passing up something glorious than risk everything on one roll of the dice."
"I don’t need the truck tomorrow, so check with Mom, and if she doesn’t either, you can take it to school."
"I’ve spoken to each of you individually over the last week about the memory chair my team recovered in November."
"You asked me why I wanted the chair. I hope today has given you a window into who I am, what I’m about."
"I wanted you to know, there is no place safer in the width and breadth of the entire world than the other side of that glass."
"We are sitting in a room with a machine of incredible power."
"Let me ask you something. Do you think any decent person is sad right now that nineteen students weren’t, in fact, murdered?"
"It’s like you only see the harm your chair might do."
"Humanity doesn’t have the wisdom to handle this sort of power."
"Maybe the wrong people were at the controls."
"This group needs your voice. Your skepticism."
"Life with a cheat code isn't life. Our existence isn't something to be engineered or optimized for the avoidance of pain."
"That’s what it is to be human—the beauty and the pain, each meaningless without the other."
"It’s just a product of our evolution the way we experience reality and time from moment to moment."
"I wouldn’t change anything. I’m glad you came into my life when you did. I’m glad for the time we had."
"The memory of his daughter hurts because he experienced a beautiful thing that has since gone away."
"What then is time? If no one asks me, I know what it is. If I wish to explain it to him who asks, I do not know."
"I think that if you and I could go back to before she died, even if we could somehow prevent it, you still would have gone your way, and I would’ve gone mine."