Because even if a universe’s life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not.

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

“Four things do not come back: the spoken word, the sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity,”

Literacy encourages a culture to place more value on documentation and less on subjective experience, and overall I think the positives outweigh the negatives.

And whether or not your brain is impelled by the air that once impelled mine, through the act of reading my words, the patterns that form your thoughts become an imitation of the patterns that once formed mine. And in that way I live again, through you.

It’s no coincidence that “aspiration” means both hope and the act of breathing.

What that demonstrates to me is that we as humans are capable of creating meaning for our own lives.

Within our minds, each of us will be transformed from an oral culture into a literate one.