The Years of Rice and Salt

History till now has been like women's periods, a little egg of possibility, hidden in the ordinary material of life, with tiny barbarian hordes maybe charging in, trying to find it, failing, fighting each other—finally a bloody mess ends that chance, and everything has to start all over.

What kind of story am I going to give them next? Because that's what we are to other people, boy, we are their gossip. That's all civilization is, a giant mill grinding out gossip. And so I could be the story of the man who rode high and fell hard, and had his spirit broken and crawled off into a hole like a dog, to die as soon as he could manage it. Or I could be the story of a man who rode high and fell hard, and then got up defiant, and walked away in a new direction.

Plague was plague, and could not be treated lightly. And this plague was obviously worse than most, having killed everyone in the region.

A sudden gust: How big the world seems in a wind.

Rock is much more malleable than ideas.

He often spoke aloud to himself now, or hummed, without ever noticing it, as if ignoring an old companion who always said the same things.

The world operates by number, by physical laws, expressed mathematically. If you know these, you will have a better grasp of things. And some possible job skills.

It is always the teacher who must learn the most … or else nothing real has happened in the exchange.

Anything divine must come to us in worldly clothing, and so it comes to us altered. The divine is like rain striking the earth, and all our efforts at godliness are therefore muddy—all but those few seconds of complete inundation, the moments that the mystics describe, when we are nothing but rain.

We live in a universe ruled by very few laws, but the redoubling of violence by violence is one of the main ones.