The only thing known to go faster than ordinary light is monarchy, according to the philosopher Ly Tin Weedle. He reasoned like this: you can't have more than one king, and tradition demands that there is no gap between kings, so when a king dies the succession must therefore pass to the heir instantaneously. Presumably, he said, there must be some elementary particles — kingons, or possibly queons — that do this job, but of course succession sometimes fails if, in mid-flight, they strike an anti-particle, or republicon. His ambitious plans to use his discovery to send messages, involving the careful torturing of a small king in order to modulate the signal, were never fully expanded because, at that point, the bar closed.

She had opened her mind to the words the way an eye used to darkness, veiled with its lashes, opens cautiously to the light, and, finding it even a little blinding, closes itself too late. The light had come, and come invincibly, even after the eye had renounced it. It was too late to unsee.

…she must conceive the piece along the lines of Chartres Cathedral. The prose style should be permanent and solid but appear light. The first two paragraphs should be like a walk down the apse, always heading in a straight line toward the predictable climax but also offering glancing views of interesting side chapels. Finally, the ultimate paragraph should be like arriving at the transept, with light flooding in from all sides.

Singularity, The. The Techno-Rapture. A black hole in the Extropian worldview whose gravity is so intense that no light can be shed on what lies beyond it.

I saw nothing but that light then as I drew blood. And then this next thing, this next thing was… sound. A dull roar at first and then a pounding like the pounding of a drum, growing louder and louder, as if some enormous creature were coming up on one slowly trough a dark and alien forest, pounding as he came, a huge drum. And then there came the pounding of another drum, as if another giant were coming yards behind him, and each giant, intent on his own drum, gave no notice to the rhythm of the other. The sound grew louder and louder until it seemed to fill not just my hearing but all my senses, to be throbbing in my lips and fingers, in the flesh of my temples, in my veins. Above all, in my veins, drum and then the other drum; and then Lestat pulled his wrist free suddenly, and I opened my eyes and checked myself in a moment of reaching for his wrist, grabbing it, forcing it back to my mouth at all costs; I checked myself because I realized that the drum was my heart, and the second drum had been his.

The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful.

Poets, like painters, thus, unskilled to trace
The naked nature and the living grace,
With gold and jewels cover every part,
And hide with ornaments their want of art.
True wit is nature to advantage dressed;
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed;
Something, whose truth convinced at sight we find
That gives us back the image of our mind.
As shades more sweetly recommend the light,
So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit
For works may have more wit than does them good,
As bodies perish through excess of blood.

Life is a sexually transmitted disease.

My favorite self-destructive candidate was a young philosophy graduate who delivered his opening-day introduction to the course. Several rivals had handed out syllabi and lectured on course rules. Yawn. But he began, “I am … ” — then clenched his face and grimaced while uttering his name. “And this is … ” — he sighed as if about to reveal the Ark of the Covenant — “Philosophy 101.”

Scorning preliminary definitions or rules, he drew Plato's cave on the board, complete with men, sun, shadows, and perhaps mice and lollipops, then announced, “This is a lesson in symbols. To study philosophy is to recognize the cave. Philosophy is not afraid of anything! Nothing!” He groaned like Prometheus having his liver pecked out by the eagle. “So how does learning happen?”

He turned toward the board as though to write, then spun back with wild eyes and cried, “I don't know!” His eight “students” jerked back as if Beelzebub had sprung at us. “What's going on here? I don't know!” He stared at his notes, then brushed them to the floor. “We will wrestle with the important questions. We will be afraid of nothing!” His passion swelled and deflated six times a minute as anguish and chaos battled for his soul.

Why not, also, other trees with immense, splendid flowers, perfuming whole regions? Why not other elements beside fire, air, earth, and water? There are four, only four, nursing fathers of various beings! What a pity! Why should not there be forty, four hundred, four thousand! How poor everything is, how mean and wretched—grudgingly given, poorly invented, clumsily made! Ah! the elephant and the hippopotamus, what power! And the camel, what suppleness!

But the butterfly, you will say, a flying flower! I dream of one that should be as large as a hundred worlds, with wings whose shape, beauty, colors, and motion I cannot even express. But I see it—it flutters from star to star, refreshing them and perfuming them with the light and harmonious breath of its flight! And the people up there gaze at it as it passes in an ecstasy of delight!

And at whom does rice smile
with infinitely many white teeth?