Mark O'Connell Quotes

#1. Irony is a treacherous servant; unless it's very carefully watched over, it has a tendency to expose the foolishness of its apparent master.

Mark O'Connell

#2. Sometimes by simply sharing ourselves we become pillars for other people

Mark O'Connell

#3. Its badness is so potent that it seems to undermine the very idea of literature, to expose the whole endeavour of making art out of language as essentially and irredeemably fraudulent

Mark O'Connell

#4. The robot successfully dismounted the car, proceeding at a slight crouch, and with exaggerated caution, toward the door; these movements it performed in the manner of a prodigiously shitfaced man intent on demonstrating that he had only had a couple of sherries with dinner.

Mark O'Connell

#5. This is one of the problems with reality: the extent to which it resembles bad fiction.

Mark O'Connell

#6. The culture of the Epic Fail, in its rituals of comic sacrifice, is a culture of sublimated predation.

Mark O'Connell

#7. I pressed him gently on the matter, but he seemed a little reticent, which is maybe what you'd be wise to expect from a cryptologist who was also a practicing hermeticist.

Mark O'Connell

#8. I'd begun to think of the Immortality Bus as the Entropy Bus, and of ourselves as trundling across Texas in a great mobile metaphor for the inevitable decline of all things, the disintegration of all systems over time.

Mark O'Connell

#9. This was what we did as a species, after all: we built ingenious devices, and we destroyed things.

Mark O'Connell

#10. The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, certainly, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.

Mark O'Connell