I like books. My favorite to read are fiction (I particularly like Joyce, James, Kafka, and more lightly: King and Neal Stephenson), while my favorite to ponder are non (
math,
philosophy,
coding).
Here are all the
quotes from the Messiah's Handbook in Richard Bach's
Illusions. (Note: I don't agree
with a lot of the ideas, but I think they are at least
worth considering.)
Here are some quotes from some books I like
(inspired by Susan's quote page):
In the beginning ... was the Command Line
by Neal Stephenson
anyone who has no culture, other than [the] global
monoculture, is completely screwed.
It was sort of like watching the girl you've been in love
with for ten years get killed in a car wreck, then attending
her autopsy, and learning that underneath the clothes and
makeup she was just flesh and blood.
...in trying to understand the Linux phenomenon, then, we have to look not to a single innovator but to a sort of bizarre Trinity: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, and Bill Gates. Take away any of these three and Linux would not exist.
Lisp ... is the only computer languate that is beautiful
If Microsoft ever makes a software package that I use and like, then it really will be time to dump their stock, because I am a market segment of one.
Should we throw another human wave of structural engineers at stabilizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, or should we just let the damn thing fall over a build a tower that doesn't suck?
I think that the message is very clear here: somewhere outside of and beyond our universe is an operating system, coded up over incalculable spans of time by some kind of hacker-demiurge. The cosmic operating system uses a command line interface. It runs on something like a teletype, with lots of noise and heat; punched-out bits flutter down into its hopper like drifting stars. The demiurge sits at his teletype, pounding out one command line after another, specifying the values of fundamental constants of physics:
universe -G 6.672e-11 -e 1.602e-19 -h 6.626e-34 -protonmass 1.673e-27 ...
and when he's finished typing out the command line, his right pinky hesitates above the enter key for an aeon or two, wondering what's going to happen; then down it comes -- and the whack you hear is another Big Bang.
... you would boot it up and it would present you with a dialog box with a single large button in the middle labeled: LIVE. Once you had clicked that button, your life would begin. If anything got out of whack, or failed to meet your expectations, you could complain about it to Microsoft's Customer Support Department. If you got a flack on the line, he or she would tell you that your life was actually fine, that there was not a thing wrong with it, and in any event it would be a lot better after the next upgrade was rolled out. But if you persisted, and identified yourself as advanced, you might get through to an actual engineer.
What would the engineer say, after you had explained your problem and enumerated all of the dissatisfactions in your life? He would probably tell you that life is a very hard and complicated thing; that no interface can change that; that anyone who believes otherwise is a sucker; and that if you don't like having choices made for you, you should start making your own.