Katabasis - R.F. Kuang
Chapter One > Page 9 · Location 177
“THE DREADFUL, TRAGIC DEATH OF PROFESSOR Jacob Grimes had been both foreseeable and avoidable. It was also, unknown to most, entirely Alice’s fault.”
Chapter One > Page 10 · Location 192
“She felt, as she often did, that her body had no defined boundaries from the material world; that if she stopped holding herself together as a subject, she would dissolve like a sugar cube in tea. She was in no state to work, and she had not been for a very long time. What Alice needed most then was a nice long holiday, and then perhaps institutionalization at some remote facility near the sea.”
Chapter One > Page 18 · Location 289
“Analytic magick. Chalk, surface, paradox. The paradox—the crucial element. The word paradox comes from two Greek roots: para, meaning “against,” and doxa, meaning “belief.” The trick of magick is to defy, trouble, or, at the very least, dislodge belief.”
Chapter One > Page 19 · Location 312
“One could become zero. One could become two. A blink of an eye, and the fact of the matter was not. If the world could be fluid for you once, how many more times could you make it dance according to your whims?”
Chapter Two > Page 37 · Location 545
“An unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates tells us. Therefore to seek reincarnation is to gamble with overwhelmingly bad odds on a life not worth living. For instance, once reincarnated, we could end up doing something like—I don’t know, working rice paddies in China.” “Milking cows in Arkansas,” agreed the more intact girl. “Mining diamonds in Africa.” “Now, look here,” said Alice. “That’s rather prejudiced—” “Being an idiot.” “Being an idiot!” All four Shades shuddered; a quivering mass of jelly. “Oh, the horror! Oh, to not be clever!” And one of them wailed, “What if you never learn to read!”” =
Chapter Three > Page 50 · Location 725
“one of them had to be delusional. This was the key to flourishing in graduate school. You could do anything if you were delusional. “I’m sure it’s very nice below.””
Chapter Four > Page 60 · Location 861
““Oh, he took a job in industry,” they would say, as if “industry” here was a euphemism like a farm for old sick dogs. And they said it with a kind, patronizing lilt that betrayed what they truly meant: alt academia meant failure. The life of the mind, unfettered from commerce, was the only kind worth living.”
Chapter Five > Page 77 · Location 1080
““Christ,” said Peter. “Hell is a campus.””
Chapter Six > Page 98 · Location 1360
“The manners and smiles were always a veneer for something a bit rotten. Good old-fashioned misogyny, usually. Racism on a good day. Snobbery in most cases. Sometimes dementia. So many old men in the Senior Common Room who demanded you help find their glasses, and also explain what all those colored folk were on about.”
Chapter Eight > Page 125 · Location 1719
“When it came down to it, magick was not really about how much complicated maths or logic or linguistics you had. Rather, the final push to make a spell work was just the power of belief. It wasn’t about the algorithms at all, it was about self-deception. You had to assemble enough proof to convince yourself the world could be another way, and as long as you could trick yourself, then you could trick the world.”
Chapter Eight > Page 125 · Location 1727
“I am Alice Law. I am a postgraduate at Cambridge. I study analytic magick. I am in Hell. And everything is going just fine, just fine, just fine”
Chapter Ten > Page 161 · Location 2212
“And this was merely a symptom of a world where children did not read but sat drooling before a screen; where artists splattered paint at random and thought themselves Michelangelo’s equal. Theirs was not a world of learned men; it had no attention for sustained inquiry; the people of their age only wanted tabloids, gossip, entertainment. Civilizational collapse, impending apocalypse—they forgot the greatness of their forefathers, they were trapped in pointless little debates; they could not get out, no one knew how to think anymore.”
Chapter Eleven > Page 177 · Location 2421
“when she was either sleep-deprived or desperate enough, be very fond of and unfortunately attracted to Peter Murdoch. But she would be a fool to think that she knew him.”
Chapter Twelve > Page 199 · Location 2729
“Deep down she suspected being in love just was two people lying to each other, concealing their violence, and so Peter’s proposal was thus misaligned with her priority to look out for herself.”
Chapter Thirteen > Page 212 · Location 2901
“She cracked jokes, references meant only for him, but he did not laugh, or did not hear. On many occasions she lingered at doorways, hoping to walk out with him, but he walked past without seeing her. It was so humiliating the way she’d lingered, hoping for his attention—like a dog that didn’t know that it had been abandoned, that kept on coming back. He was not rude to her.”
Chapter Thirteen > Page 214 · Location 2935
“And if you could constantly reinvent yourself, cut away the parts of you that ashamed or hurt you, then how could you ever come to really know someone else? Were people all just living paradoxes, keeping up an illusion just long enough to survive contact with others? Were people then all a series of lies in the end? And if that was true—then what difference did it make, what history you had, what love you’d shared? That staircase was gone; the planks had reassembled, and the soul you had come to know was a newly crafted fiction. And so perhaps it was entirely possible—common, even—for you to look into the eyes of someone you’d been falling in love with, someone you had spent every waking moment with, whose breathing sounded as familiar as your own—and fail to recognize them at all.”
Chapter Seventeen > Page 260 · Location 3533
““You’re obsessed with gold stars. You never got over the high school thrill of an A + at the top of your paper and academia will let you chase those little gold stars for the rest of your life.” He flicked her forehead. “Little ivory tower princess, you. You’re a teacher’s pet, Alice. You have a fetish for validation.””
Chapter Seventeen > Page 260 · Location 3540
“anything that made you forget to eat, drink, sleep, or maintain basic relationships—anything that made you so inhumanly excited—had to be pursued with single-minded devotion.”
Chapter Seventeen > Page 261 · Location 3551
“She was very proud of the days that she forgot to eat. Not because she had any revulsion for food, but because it was some proof that she had transcended some basic cycle of need. That she was not just an animal after all, held captive by her desires to eat and fuck and shit. That she was above all a mind, and the mind was capable of miraculous things.”
Chapter Eighteen > Page 271 · Location 3691
““Why?” “Because it hurts to be human, I’m sure,” said Elspeth. “Hurts to be reminded what you don’t have anymore. Better to erase yourself bit by bit, until you are only what you need in the present moment.” She shrugged. “We all do it. Even the living.”
Chapter Eighteen > Page 271 · Location 3695
“Alice didn’t find this so awful. Why wouldn’t everyone strip away the parts of their selves that caused them pain? She’d like to learn that trick, she thought. If she could sift through that mess in her head, pull out the files that kept torturing her, and burn them. Every small humiliation, every shred of guilt—if only she could unclutter her mind so that all that was left was the elements she wanted to keep: the burning core, the hunger for knowledge, the skills to gain it. You could achieve so much without the burdens of personhood. Who wouldn’t wash away the rest?”
Chapter Twenty-One > Page 332 · Location 4522
“She didn’t care much for Socrates, but she did like the way Aristotle wrote about the world, the soul, the form of living creatures. He had such faith in their drive to flourish. And she remembered reading Aristotle’s argument about how any living being, even the most primitive organism, was animated by an idea of the good. Even the plant turned its face toward the sun. Even the tiniest ant sought food; the brainless worm sought soil. It was all so easy for living creatures—all except people, except people like her, who had a knack for seeking only that which made them miserable.”
Chapter Twenty-Three > Page 370 · Location 5034
““Lines that are parallel meet at Infinity!” Euclid repeatedly, heatedly, urged Until he died. and so reached that vicinity: in it he found that the damned things diverged.—PIET HEIN, “PARALLELISM”“
Chapter Twenty-Five > Page 387 · Location 5244
“Damn Peter and his exceptions. Whether she liked it or not, he’d buried within her a seed that she couldn’t grind away. Like Dante’s Adam and Noah, like Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem, like the possibility of a True Contradiction, maybe going on meant believing in what she couldn’t possibly know. Maybe if she went on she could find some way to make this pain stop. Maybe. Maybe.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight > Page 434 · Location 5871
“Then she wondered where to locate the flaw in Gertrude’s thinking. Was there one at all? For in a world where none of the rules were stable, why not believe in an apocalyptic reversal of the moral order? Why was that so unlikely? Wasn’t there a perverse beauty to it all? What conviction—to do wrong and stand by it—how much bolder it was than to do right simply because one was afraid. Just then Alice envied Gertrude. At least Gertrude knew what she stood for. At least Gertrude had a future to fight for, faraway as it was.”
Chapter Thirty > Page 467 · Location 6325
“He sounded peevish. “But at least you’d still be here.” “If I die, I die,” said Alice. “But there’s no life otherwise, I think. Life is an activity that’s got to be sustained. You have to fight for it. Otherwise it’s no life at all. That’s just it. It’s just an impulse. And we’ve both determined that’s not enough. You know that.””
Chapter Thirty-Two > Page 495 · Location 6691
“She put all these remembrances in a little box and locked it and held it at the forefront of her mind, as if she could keep it there with sheer force of will. Give me Peter—let me be a monument to Peter—if I am an otherwise empty shell on this desert, a broken record that plays one memory, that will be all right.”
Chapter Thirty-Two > Page 496 · Location 6707
“Nothing is better than eternal happiness. A cheese toastie is better than nothing. Shouldn’t it stand to reason, then, that a cheese toastie is better than eternal happiness?”
Chapter Thirty-Three > Page 503 · Location 6798
““But surely you knew.” Elspeth gave her a look of deep pity. “He was in love with you.” Two contradictory statements came to Alice’s mind then, and she couldn’t decide which one seemed more plausible, so she uttered them both. “That can’t be.” And then, “But I didn’t know.” “Then you’re blind,” said Elspeth, “because it was written all over his face. Yours, too.””
Chapter Thirty-Three > Page 504 · Location 6824
“Alice heard Peter’s voice in her head. The world is not a complete system; there is always an exception. No explanation for its existence; no reason why one might expect it to have existed before or ever exist again. The world was simply unknowable; exceptions cropped up all the time, and all you had to do to beat the odds was just look.”
Chapter Thirty-Three > Page 505 · Location 6828
““A contradiction explosion …” Slowly the implications caught up to her. They wouldn’t just be able to leave Hell. They could change everything. With the True Contradiction on one side of a proof, they could write anything else into validity. They could end world hunger, end famine and wars, reshape reality’s boundaries however they liked. If they could just get the True Contradiction out of this place, they could do anything. “But then that makes you God, Elspeth.”
Chapter Thirty-Three > Page 507 · Location 6857
““We don’t understand the gods very well,” said Elspeth. “But we should not assume they have the same constraints as mortal beings. King Yama theoretically has control over his entire domain. I don’t think he lets something like a True Contradiction hang around just out of sheer negligence. I don’t think the gods do negligence.” “Then you think he left it here on purpose.” “Rules are so boring,” said Elspeth. “So is infinity. You can’t knock about a closed system forever; the possibilities run out. I think, then, sometimes the gods like to play. Just for the hell of it.” “Peter thought something similar,” said Alice. “It’s how he interpreted Gödel. There are always exceptions. There’s always something unexplainable, meaning at some level everything becomes possible.” “That’s a good sentiment to hold on to,” said Elspeth. “Better than the alternative.””
Chapter Thirty-Four > Page 522 · Location 7057
“She had outshone at puzzles and abstractions her entire life, and still she had not learned a single thing about how to live. She did not want to tilt into their world anymore, she only wanted to touch something solid.”
Chapter Thirty-Four > Page 526 · Location 7108
“this was the worst thing that Professor Grimes had ever done to her—made her doubt she was a good scholar. He’d destroyed her faith in her own ability to think, and to judge the results of her thought, instead of turning to him at every step for confirmation. And it was just so unfortunate that it took his death for her to conceive, research, and carry out an entire project on her own.”
Chapter Thirty-Four > Page 528 · Location 7147
““You can’t do this,” said Professor Grimes. “You’re supposed to be impartial, you can’t just—arbitrarily—it’s against the rules.” “Haven’t you learned, Jacob Grimes?” King Yama’s smile looked demonic beneath his furrowed brows. “Hell has no rules.””
Chapter Thirty-Five > Page 532 · Location 7186
“At last she pulled back, but he did not; his fingers curled into her hair, his other hand against her back, and pulled her close again; fierce, unrelenting. He held her like an anchor, like without her he would dissolve. He kissed her, and even when their lips parted his forehead stayed pressed against hers, as if any distance between them was unforgivable.”
Chapter Thirty-Five > Page 533 · Location 7204
““But then you came for nothing.” “Not nothing.” She traced her thumbs down his cheeks. What a marvel, she thought; his face, his jaw, the prickly stubble where his hairline meets his temple. God carved this boy. “Not nothing. I gained everything.” His fingers wrapped around hers. “Oh, Alice …””
Chapter Thirty-Five > Page 535 · Location 7229
““You know, you magicians believe the funniest things about the world. You think your spells work because you’ve fooled the world. You think you’re simply so clever that you’ve talked circles around the rules, that the world is so baffled it has no choice but to obey your commands. You don’t realize that nature knows you’re lying. You draw your little circles, and we bend and pretend, the same way parents pretend when their toddlers lie.” He scratched his chin. “But we deities are lenient, you see. We do love to be amused.””
Chapter Thirty-Five > Page 540 · Location 7302
“It seemed too good a deal to be true, one little pomegranate tree for all the myriad blossoms in the world. How could she deserve life? Who ever deserved life? But you could not question such gifts. Elspeth had taught her this. There was no answer, only wondrous and inexplicable grace, and the only thing to do in return was simply to live.”
Chapter Thirty-Five > Page 541 · Location 7305
“She took a breath. “Ready?” Peter squeezed her hand tight. “After you.” Alice climbed up, Peter close behind her. And together they emerged, to rebehold the stars.”