## Metadata - Author: [[John Wray]] - Full Title: The Lost Time Accidents - Category: #books ## Highlights - “This world is a loony bin, Schätzchen,” he told her. “Luckily for us, our front door happens to be one of its exits.” ([Location 1801](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011I42VY4&location=1801)) - He’d never taken much interest in the details of domesticity before—the dining table’s waxy patina, the dust along the hem of the curtains, the lingering smell of whitewash in the foyer—but they came, little by little, to intrigue him more profoundly than the greatest enigmas of physics. The minutiae of daily life were enigmas, after all; and wasn’t physics’ highest purpose to explain them? ([Location 2169](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011I42VY4&location=2169)) - They seemed less like children to him, these beings he’d engendered, than like primates of some other, fiercer order; and though he eventually came to love them more than life, this first impression never fully left him. He’d have died before admitting it to Sonja, but Kaspar’s fascination with his daughters was not the doting that it so resembled. Passionate as it was, his interest in the twins was scientific. ([Location 2183](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011I42VY4&location=2183)) - ARE YOU LIVING THE LIFE THAT YOUR MAKER INTENDED? Does your life lack the flavor, the crackle, the intensity you’ve hoped for? Daily, we find ourselves bombarded by a thousand recommendations for extending the duration of our lives—exercise three times weekly! smoke in moderation! exchange sugar for saccharine!—but the truth is that time does not gain value by accruing. Time acquires value by being “spent,” and spent freely. The longest life is not always the best one; in the majority of cases, just the opposite. If you are, in fact, living the life that your maker intended—it may be time to seek another maker. ([Location 2241](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011I42VY4&location=2241)) - “I couldn’t possibly eat as much dinner,” Ungarsky growled into his beard, “as I’d like to be able to puke.” ([Location 2292](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011I42VY4&location=2292)) - He’d long since discovered that time (beyond its obvious importance) was wondrously useful as a descriptive tool, sometimes even as a metaphor: it was invaluable in writing about sex and robotics and beauty and the vastness of space, to name a few favorite topics. There was a catch, however, an unforeseen con, which was that sex and robotics and beauty and the vastness of space (not to mention love, and death, and even good old-fashioned human consciousness) seemed to Orson, more often than not, to be metaphors for writing about time. ([Location 4501](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011I42VY4&location=4501)) - I fell back from him dizzily, shaking my head. “That’s not science, Uncle. That’s witchcraft.” “Synonyms, Nefflein.” His voice had gone rapt. “Two words for approaching the nexus of things.” ([Location 4717](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011I42VY4&location=4717)) - In tarock, the Sküs (L’excuse in French) is the deck’s highest trump, but it has no rank or value of its own. Alone among the trumps, L’excuse has no number: its power emerges only in challenge to another card. Orson began to understand its appeal for him now, since he often felt that way about himself. ([Location 4744](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011I42VY4&location=4744)) - “Have you not understood?” Ozymandias answered sadly. “We travel through time all our lives—into the future at the speed at which we age, and into the past each time that we remember. There is only the brain, after all; however we choose to employ it, we have no other device. But the brain, my dear brothers, is more than enough. Our consciousness is all the time machine we need.” ([Location 5506](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011I42VY4&location=5506)) - For a long list of reasons, Orson had decided not to have children, not ever, and he was certain—as certain as he could be, without recalling a specific conversation—that Ursula had tacitly agreed. Among his reasons were: Ursula’s unfinished doctorate, global overpopulation, the small but persistent possibility of a thermonuclear strike by the Soviet Union, loss of sleep, crib death, his own questionable suitability for fatherhood, shit-sodden diapers, the educational crisis, the Vietnam War and childbirth-related changes to the morphology of the uterine wall. ([Location 5721](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011I42VY4&location=5721)) - Memory is a politician, Mrs. Haven, as every historian knows: a manipulative, pandering appeaser. ([Location 5738](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B011I42VY4&location=5738))