#singular

Beauty is the result of having been through an experience all the way through to the end - therefore it has a poignancy. Beauty that is singular always comes from following an experience to the point where you can go no further. ↗

— Joan Chen

#beauty #been #comes #end #experience

A modern civilization is only possible when it is accepted that singular beings exist and express themselves freely. ↗

— Tahar Ben Jelloun

#beings #civilization #exist #express #freely

Anyone who knows a strange fact shares in its singularity. ↗

— Jean Genet

#fact #knows #shares #singularity #strange

Poetry should surprise by a fine excess and not by singularity, it should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance. ↗

— John Keats

#appear #excess #fine #highest #his

We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living. ↗

— Rem Koolhaas

#best #cities #context #create #desired

The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being. ↗

— Vernor Vinge

#center #contradicts #deeply #held #humankind

A file on a hard disk does indeed contain information of the kind that objectively exists. The fact that the bits are discernible instead of being scrambled into mush - the way heat scrambles things - is what makes them bits. But if the bits can potentially mean something to someone, they can only do so if they are experienced. When that happens, a commonality of culture is enacted between the storer and the retriever of the bits. Experience is the only process that can de-alienate information. Information of the kind that purportedly wants to be free is nothing but a shadow of our own minds, and wants nothing on its own. It will not suffer if it doesn't get what it wants. But if you want to make the transition from the old religion, where you hope God will give you an afterlife, to the new religion, where you hope to become immortal by getting uploaded into a computer, then you have to believe information is real and alive. So for you, it will be important to redesign human institutions like art, the economy, and the law to reinforce the perception that information is alive. You demand that the rest of us live in your new conception of a state religion. You need us to deify information to reinforce your faith. ↗

— Jaron Lanier

#information #internet #singularity #technology #art

This singularity of meaning--I was my face, I was ugliness--though sometimes unbearable, also offered a possible point of escape. It became the launching pad from which to lift off, the one immediately recognizable place to point to when asked what was wrong with my life. Everything led to it, everything receded from it--my face as personal vanishing point. ↗

— Lucy Grealy

#life #pain #singularity #ugliness #ugly

Acting isn't a singular profession, it is a collaborate profession. ↗

— Edie McClurg

#collaborate #profession #singular

I became a loner. I became a mountain man. A lot of those things are very good qualities and they help you do your work, help you be singular and keep the artistic integrity of your work intact, but they don't make it very easy to live your life. ↗

— John Milius

#became #easy #good #good qualities #help