Heat Death Quotes

I stare at my freakish eyeball, gaze into the distorted pupil until it expands and fills the mirror, fills my brain and I'm rushing through vacuum. Wide awake and so far at such speed I flatten into a subatomic contrail. That grand cosmic maw, that eater of galaxies, possesses sufficient gravitational force to rend the fabric of space and time, to obliterate reality, and in I go, bursting into trillions of minute particles, quadrillions of whining fleas, consumed. Nanoseconds later, I understand everything there is to understand. Reduced to my "essential saltes" as it were, I'm the prime mover seed that gets sown after the heat death of the universe when the Ouroboros swallows itself and the cycle begins anew with a big bang. ~ Laird Barron

A multiverse hurtling toward an inevitable heat death 100 trillion years in the future. An alien race of religious fanatics bent on absorbing all sentient life. Another alien race fighting back. A world of magicians living in secret. And himself, a contractor, a human Vorid that could absorb his enemies and grow stronger. All in less than 24 hours. And here he was, relaxing on his roof. Maybe video games really did desensitize you to this stuff. Except if he died, he wasn't going to pop back to life. ~ Andrew Ball

She swore she could prove it mathematically, but the calculations required were so involved that they would have required a computer the size of the universe, running for a length of time that would have taken them past the projected heat-death of the universe, to work them out. It was pretty much the definition of moot. ~ Lev Grossman

Entropy," she chirps. "It's the theory that all matter in the universe is gradually moving toward the same temperature. Also known as 'heat death. ~ Veronica Roth

While a number of people have pointed out the various costs and drawbacks of sentience, few if any have taken the next step and wondered out loud if the whole damn thing isn't more trouble than it's worth. Of course it is, people assume; otherwise natural selection would have weeded it out long ago. And they're probably right. I hope they are. "Blindsight" is a thought experiment, a game of "Just suppose" and "What if". Nothing more.
On the other hand, the dodos and the Steller sea cows could have used exactly the same argument to prove their own superioirity, a thousand years ago: "if we're so unfit, why haven't we gone extinct?" Why? Because natural selection takes time, and luck plays a role. The biggest boys on the block at any given time aren't necessarily the fittest, or the most efficient, and the game isn't over. The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. And so, neither can there be any winners. There are only those who haven't yet lost. ~ Peter Watts

The universe is full of echoes and shadows, the afterimages and last words of dead civilizations that have lost the struggle against entropy. Fading ripples in the cosmic background radiation, it is doubtful if most, or any, of these messages will ever be deciphered. Likewise, most of our thoughts and memories are destined to fade, to disappear, to be consumed by the very act of choosing and living. That is not a cause for sorrow, sweetheart. It is the fate of every species to disappear into the void that is the heat death of the universe. But long before then, the thoughts of any intelligent species worthy of the name will become as grand as the universe itself. ~ Ken Liu

Caroline rose. She studied him for a moment before sitting on his knee.
He wasn't quite sure exactly how it happened. If pressed, he would have asked for three or four hundred pages to write a description of the series of impossibly graceful bendings and movements that ended with her perched there with one hand on his shoulder. He didn't understand - and he was sure that it defied physics - how Caroline could be so light on that tiny patch of his legs, and yet so weighty in the way her presence affected him. Her gaze, for instance, probably clocked in at about fifty or sixty tons, to judge from the effect it was having on him.
He never wanted to move. Never, ever, ever. Let the heat death of the universe come along and he'd be quite happy to still have Caroline Hepworth sitting just like that, on his knee, looking at him without speaking. The tiny light of the shaded lantern was irrelevant. He saw everything, as if it were the brightest of middays.
It was so perfect, so hoped for, that Aubrey knew it couldn't last. He glanced around.
'What are you doing?' Caroline asked very, very softly.
'Looking for whoever is going to interrupt us.'
'That's a pessimistic outlook.'
'Wars, especially, have a habit of ignoring the lives of people.'
'If you follow that through, it suggests living for the moment is best.'
'Live without planning? Without dreams? That sounds rather limited.'
'And that sounds rather like Aubrey. ~ Michael Pryor

We all recognize grief in moments that should be celebrations; it is the salt in the pudding. Didn't Roman generals hire slaves to march beside them in a triumphant parade and remind them that they too would die? Even your narrator, one morning after what should have been a happy occasion, was found shivering at the end of the bed (spouse: "I really wish you weren't crying right now"). Don't little children, awakened one morning and told, "Now you're five!" - don't they wail at the universe's descent into chaos? The sun slowly dying, the spiral arm spreading, the molecules drifting apart second by second toward our inevitable heat death - shouldn't we all wail to the stars? ~ Andrew Sean Greer

You are exporting disorder [in the form of heat into the Universe] now as you read this book. You are hastening the demise of everything that exists, bringing forward by your very existence the arrival of time known as the heat death, when all stars have died, all black holes have evaporated away and the entirety of creation is a uniform bath of photons incapable of storing a single bit of information about the glorious adolescence of our wonderful Universe. ~ Brian Cox

all of my bases covered. You assume responsibility for violations of local, regional, global, intrasystem, interstellar, intergalactic and interdimensional law, civil, religious, or military. I'm also not responsible for loss of life and limb, property damage, domestic disputes, engineered biological human dieback, nuclear fallout, violations of causality, cascading sub-quantum misalignment, hastening of cosmic heat death, rampant AI, accelerated climate change, geomagnetic reversal, vacuum metastability events, total existence failure, gray goo scenario, red goo scenario--that's a nasty one--tectonic inversion-- ~ Joseph R. Lallo

The universe may forget us, but our light will brighten the darkness for eons after we've departed this world. The universe may forget us, but it can't forget us until we're gone, and we're still here, our futures still unwritten.

We can choose to sit on our asses and wait for the end, or we can live right now. We can march to the edge of the void and scream in defiance. Yell out for all to hear that we do matter. That we are still here, living our absurd, bullshit lives, and nothing can take that away from us. Not rogue comets, not black holes, not the heat death of the universe. We may not get to choose how we die, but we can choose how we live. ~ Shaun David Hutchinson

Let us imagine the lineaments of an economics of disorder, disequilibrium, and surprise that could explain and measure the contributions of entrepreneurs. Such an economics would begin with the Smithian mold of order and equilibrium. Smith himself spoke of property rights, free trade, sound currency, and modest taxation as conditions necessary for prosperity. He was right: disorder, disequilibrium, chaos, and noise inhibit the creative acts that engender growth. The ultimate physical entropy envisaged as the heat death of the universe, in its total disorder, affords no room for invention or surprise. But entrepreneurial disorder is not chaos or mere noise. Entrepreneurial disorder is some combination of order and upheaval that might be termed informative disorder. ~ George Gilder

Hardly has the universe stretched its wings to span
When it gathers to egg once more ~ J. Aleksandr Wootton

One day the rotting remains of their libraries will disintegrate so completely that they will be indistinguishable from the world's wrack of stray eddies and meaningless scribbles, the untide of heat death. The ~ Yoon Ha Lee

Some call them doomsday ships. These lightspeed ships have no destination at all. They turn their curvature engines to maximum and accelerate like crazy, infinitely approaching the speed of light. Their goal is to leap across time using relativity until they reach the heat death of the universe. By their calculations, ten years within their frame of reference would equal fifty billion years in ours. As a matter of fact, you don't even need to plan for it. If some malfunction occurs after a ship has accelerated to lightspeed, preventing the ship from decelerating, then you'd also reach the end of the universe within your lifetime. ~ Liu Cixin

Henceforth the cosmos, once a swarm of blazing galaxies, each a swarm of stars, was composed wholly of star-corpses. These dark grains drifted through the dark void, like an infinitely tenuous smoke rising from an extinguished fire. Upon these motes, these gigantic worlds, the ultimate populations had created here and there with their artificial lighting a pale glow, invisible even from the innermost ring of lifeless planets. ~ Olaf Stapledon

In case you're not a computer person, I should probably point out that 'Real Soon Now' is a technical term meaning 'sometime before the heat-death of the universe, maybe'. ~ Scott Fahlman

The game is never over; there's no finish line this side of heat death. ~ Peter Watts

Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good. ~ Nick Bostrom

Her last conscious thought was disgust at life; her senses had lied to her. The world was not made of energy and delight but of foulness, betrayal, and lassitude. Living was hateful, and death was no better, and from end to end of the universe this was the first and last and only truth. ~ Philip Pullman

She thought of the women at Chicken Little's funeral. The women who shrieked over the bier and at the lip of the open grave. What she had regarded since as unbecoming behavior seemed fitting to her now; they were screaming at the neck of God, his giant nape, the vast back-of-the-head that he had turned on them in death. But it seemed to her now that it was not a fist-shaking grief they were keening but rather a simple obligation to say something, do something, feel something about the dead. They could not let that heart-smashing event pass unrecorded, unidentified. It was poisonous, unnatural to let the dead go with a mere whimpering, a slight murmur, a rose bouquet of good taste. Good taste was out of place in the company of death, death itself was the essence of bad taste. And there must be much rage and saliva in its presence. The body must move and throw itself about, the eyes must roll, the hands should have no peace, and the throat should release all the yearning, despair and outrage that accompany the stupidity of loss. ~ Toni Morrison

The moment of orgasm is like the first dramatic moment of birth when you draw breath and scream out that you are alive. It is hard to imagine the moment when you fade back into the vacuum and draw your last breath. ~ Chloe Thurlow

Halloween was a celebration of life through an awareness of death, and a reminder of the presence of spirits. ~ R. Cooper

I knew the facts of death before I knew the facts of life. There never was a time when I didn't see the skull beneath the skin. ~ P.D. James

Mortality has its compensations; one is that all evils are transitory, another that better times may come. ~ George Santayana

The Asian idea is that what remains behind after death by violence is less the murdered person his or herself than an echo created by the moment of the person's death--a rip in the fabric of space and time itself. A doppelganger husk, ectoplasm with pretensions. Not "so and so's ghost" so much as just a ghost. Or just ..."ghost. ~ Gemma Files

More powerful than drugs, than God or death or fear itself, are stories. With less instinct than any flatworm, we look for them to tell us what to do, how to behave, how we're going to end up. There're plenty of atheists in foxholes, but none without a personal mythology that gives them meaning. When life seems long and meaningless, stories make it short and exciting, make every accident into a test, into enemy action, into a Plot. ~ Anonymous

When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation.
[As attributed by Alastair Reid in Neruda and Borges, The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, July 7, 1986] ~ Jorge Luis Borges

Proclaim now that you refuse to die without fully living! ~ Bryant McGill

Botha swimmer and a drowned man are in the water; the latter is borne by the water and controlled by it, while the swimmer is borne along by his own power and of his own volition. Every movement made by the drowned man - indeed, every act and word that issue from him - comes from the water, not from him ... The saints are like this. They have died before death. ~ Rumi

Monsters cut children open and call it progress. Monsters murder entire groups of people without blinking but get upset when they have to wash human ash from their garden strawberries. Monsters are the ones who watch other people do these things and do nothing to stop it. ~ Ryan Graudin

Any foolish boy can stamp on a beetle, but all the professors in the world cannot make a beetle. ~ Arthur Schopenhauer

Death's an old joke, but each individual encounters it anew. ~ Ivan Turgenev

Today, a couple with 'just married' tags collided head-on with a hearse carrying two coffins in the back, both of a married couple that had previously
died in a car accident. ~ Anthony Liccione

Hardly anyone ever leaves. This is because Des Moines is the most powerful hypnotic known to man. Outside town there is a big sign that says, WELCOME TO DES MOINES. THIS IS WHAT DEATH IS LIKE. There isn't really. I just made that up. But the place does get a grip on you. ~ Bill Bryson

Be at peace, my friend. One thing I have learnt about Death is that his bark is worse than his bite. ~ David Gemmell

It's life. You deal with it or you don't. ~ Pinder Buckley

To exclude all jurors who would be in the slightest way affected by the prospect of the death penalty would be to deprive the defendant of the impartial jury to which he or she is entitled under the law. ~ Byron White

Death may simply be an alteration in consciousness, a transition for continued life in a nonmaterial form. ~ Edgar Mitchell

1. Modern thinking is a mysterious entity, it is covered in blood and is two meters tall, its smile opens your soul to you and its smile descends to the earth and opens a portal to the dimension of eternal laughter, into a world without values.
2. Death from the dust of all the dead and dust of memories. Fear is all out of the darkness of the subconscious of billions of threads of manipulation.
3. Under the ordinary eye, the eye of anger. Under the eye of anger, the eye of despondency. Under the eye of despondency, the eye of insight of enlightenment of good and light, selfless nobleness.
4. The face tears up from laughter, and there is not flesh and soul, but a continuous smile of awareness.
5. Love is a sports scoreboard, the score of the one who loves more is kept.
6. Truth is a card. An illusion. You tilt a little, you see one, and you straighten up you see another.
7. Lust is erotic poker cards, poker for stripping the truth. Here you will win only loneliness.
8. Reality is a terrible dystopia of smiling optimism, with wired senses, with laughing monsters in your head, that is, your vices.
9. Wandering around in the midst of twilight darkness, the creative person revealed to the world what was hidden in the egg that lay in this fog, essences and monsters of the subconscious crawled out of it through the force field of imagination and depravity, through the force field they arise in the mind. Some in the imagination become prettier, ~ Musin Almat Zhumabekovich

Arithmetic is the death of story. ~ Jincy Willett

Superfluity was the only relationship I could establish between these trees, these hedges, these paths. Vainly I strove to compute the number of the chestnut trees, or their distance from the Velleda, or their height as compared with that of the plane trees; each of them escaped from the pattern I made for it, overflowed from it or withdrew. And I too among them, vile, languorous, obscene, chewing the cud of my thoughts, I too was superfluous. [I is you or I or anyone.] Luckily I did not feel it, I only understood it, but I felt uncomfortable because I was afraid of feeling it. . . . I thought vaguely of doing away with myself, to do away with at least one of these superfluous existences. But my death – my corpse, my blood poured out on this gravel, among these plants, in this smiling garden – would have been superfluous as well. I was superfluous to all eternity. ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

There is romantic nonsense these days about the beauty of death, about the terrible end becoming the lovely beginning, and I think that's wrong, a diminution of the beauty of life. Death is as terrible as birth is wonderful. The laws of physics and nature - not romance - dictate this. It occurs to me that sometimes even nature - raw, silent, solemn, and joyous nature - fears, even if only slightly, rot. ~ Rick Bass

Pop music has been all but relegated to the remainder bin at MTV and VH1, where high-maintenance concoctions such as Paris Hilton, Flavor Flav, and Hulk Hogan's biohazard clan of bleached specimens provide endless hours of death-hastening diversion. ~ James Wolcott

Maybe death is the great equalizer, the one big thing that can finally make strangers shed a tear for one another ~ Morrie Schwartz.

At sunset the little soul that had come with the dawning went away, leaving heartbreak behind it ~ L.M. Montgomery

No man at all can be living forever and we must be satisfied. ~ John Millington Synge

Without death in the world, existence in it would soon become, through over-population, the most frightful of curses. ~ Christian Nestell Bovee

I drive a hybrid, and we've changed our light bulbs and windows and installed solar panels and geothermal ground source heat pumps and most everything else. ~ Al Gore