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He looked up. Standing in the air, at eye-level, was a robed figure about six inches high. A bony nose, with bent grey whiskers, protruded from the hood. Tiny skeletal fingers gripped a very small scythe. Mr Pounder nodded thoughtfully to himself. You didn't rise to membership of the Inner Circle of the Guild of Rat catchers without hearing a few whispered rumours. Rats had their own Death, they said, as well as their own kings, parliaments and nations. No human had ever seen it, though. Up until now. He felt honoured. He'd won the Golden Mallet for most rats caught every year for the past five years, but he respected them, as a soldier. might respect a cunning and valiant enemy. 'Er. . . I'm dead, aren't I. . . ?' SQUEAK. Mr Pounder felt that many eyes were watching him. Many small, shining eyes. 'And. . . what happens now?' SQUEAK. The soul of Mr Pounder looked at his hands. They seemed to be elongating, and getting hairier. He could feel his ears growing, and a certain rather embarrassing elongation happening at the base of his spine. He'd spent most of his life in a single-minded activity in dark places, yet even so. . .

'But I don't believe in reincarnation!' he protested. SQUEAK. And this, Mr Pounder understood with absolute rodent clarity, meant: reincarnation believes in you.

— Maskerade by Terry Pratchett, Peter Serafinowicz, Indira Varma (Narrator), and 1 other (Discworld, #18)

Ingen ville bli gamle og ta farvel med verden, heller ikke Hanne. Hun fant seg ikke i sånt, det kom bare ikke til å skje. De siste skulle bli de første. Hun skulle komme de idiotisk selvopptatte venninnene i forkjøpet og bli professor, og mer enn det, hun skulle vise verden, hun skulle vise hvor inn i helvete mye alle gikk glipp av når de gikk glipp av henne. Hun skulle lage sitt eget tankesystem. Sånn var det. Hun var ridd av hybris, og det var kanskje like greit, for da fikk hun noe til å skje. Ja, Hanne var gudskjelov høy på pæra, og dette, i kombinasjon med en serie nattlige drømmer om sin rolle som fortolker av Romerriket fikk henne til å skride til handling og søke opptak som masterstudent.

— Mitt følelsesliv er som en åpen bok by Kristine Næss

A strange thing had happened to Choubris Holse. He had become interested in what was, if he understood such matters rightly, not a million strides away from being philosophy.

— Matter by Iain M. Banks (Culture, #8)

Jeg viser tenna mine til han, liksom sånn man gjør når man smiler.

— Og forresten heter jeg Leah by Elida Karo

One day it will be considered unacceptable, in the polite liberal circles of the West, not to acknowledge all the innocent people killed in that long-ago unpleasantness. The truth and reconciliation committees are coming. The land acknowledgments are coming. The very sorry descendants are coming. After all, grief in arrears is grief just the same. Entire departments of postcolonial studies will churn out papers interrogating the obliviousness that led us all to that very dark place, as though no one had seen from the beginning exactly what that place was, as though no one had screamed warnings at the top of their lungs back when there was time to do something. One day the social currency of liberalism will accept as legal tender the suffering of those they previously smothered in silence, turned away from in disgust as one does carrion on the roadside. Far enough gone, the systemic murder of a people will become safe enough to fit on a lawn sign. There’s always room on a liberal’s lawn.

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate)

Whatever late capitalism is, it seems to be careening into this embrace of growth by negation. Through that prism, it’s hard not to see the advances in something like artificial intelligence less driven by technological breakthroughs as by a society that has, over years, over decades, become normalized to a greater and greater magnitude of both loneliness and theft, such that a sputtering algorithm badly trained on the stolen work of real human beings might be celebrated with a straight face as something approximating humanness. Under this ordering, it is not some corporation’s increasing capacity for better that drives the extractive world, but everyone else’s increasing tolerance for worse. Unconfronted, this kind of negation will not remain confined to widgets or labor or even the economic world. When the bigger wildfires come—as they already have—the industries whose callous disregard helped bring this about will depend on our ever-growing tolerance for calamity. When climate change upends the lives of billions, our governments will depend on our ever-growing tolerance for violence against the hordes of nameless others to enact its cruelest, most violent fortressing. In time, negation becomes all there is. To walk away from this system is to speak the only language the system will ever understand. Otherwise, there will be nothing left under this way of living. In the end we will be asked to normalize not just unlimited extraction and unlimited suffering but total absence, a hollow that will look an awful lot like the one we were asked to overlay onto the minimum-wage workers and the climate refugees and the victims of endless colonial wars and, yes, even those dead Palestinian children who, had they been allowed to live, might have done something terrible.

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate)

To be accused of speaking too loudly about one injustice but not others by someone who doesn’t care about any of them is to be told, simply, to keep quiet.

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate)

A world that shrugs at one kind of slaughter has developed a terrible immunity. No atrocity is too great to shrug away now, the muscles of indifference having been sufficiently conditioned.

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate)

Daily we are told there is nothing better than this. Our graphics cards and loafers arrive at our doorsteps the same day we order them—what more is there to want? We hurtle from shock to shock, bubble to bubble, oriented in the direction of complete ecological collapse and a future mortgaged beyond any hope of repayment. Yet we are told the most frightening thing is not this building chaos, but rather the possibility that any other course might end in secret police and breadlines. Daily the entirety of the right-wing sphere and an alarming number of liberals fret about a generation of young people deluded into Marxism or some other ideological bogeyman. When students at the most prestigious universities in North America build encampments in solidarity with Palestine, it’s difficult to believe the institutional response isn’t colored by a sense of betrayal. These young people have been afforded entry into the heart of the system, with all the privileges that entails. That they should jettison such a privilege in favor of a people on the other side of the planet who are able to offer nothing in return—to an ideology fixated on self-interest, it must seem like an embrace of nihilism.

— One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad (duplicate)