A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.
Neil GaimanRead
My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness. It's quiet.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the comfort and refuge found in technology and solitude.
Neil Gaiman's quote reflects on the modern experience of people who, in the safety of their homes, connect with the world through technology. It suggests that while we may be physically isolated, our keyboards facilitate communication and creativity, allowing us to navigate through darkness and quietude in our own unique way.
In practice
During a speech on the impact of technology on social interaction, this quote can illustrate the advantages of staying connected online.
A short story is the ultimate close-up magic trick -- a couple of thousand words to take you around the universe or break your heart.
Jesus. Low-Key Lyesmith," said Shadow. and then he heard what he was saying and he understood. "Loki," he said. "Loki Lie-smith." "You're slow," said Loki, "but you get there in the end." And his lips twisted into a scarred smile and the embers danced in the shadows of his eyes.
As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.
The important thing to understand about American history, wrote Mr. Ibis, in his leather-bound journal, is that it is fictional, a charcoal-sketched simplicity for the children, or the easily bored.
Nothing’s changed. You’ll go home. You’ll be bored. You’ll be ignored. No one will listen to you, really listen to you. You’re too clever and too quiet for them to understand. They don’t even get your name right.
I like the stars. It's the illusion of permanence, I think. I mean, they're always flaring up and caving in and going out. But from here, I can pretend...I can pretend that things last. I can pretend that lives last longer than moments. Gods come, and gods go. Mortals flicker and flash and fade. Worlds don't last; and stars and galaxies are transient, fleeting things that twinkle like fireflies and vanish into cold and dust. But I can pretend.
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
We nonchalantly expect that next year's smartphone will be faster and better than this year's, yet we struggle to imagine that society and our lives could progress at anything like the pace at which technology advances and we meekly accept it when things go backwards.
Every one of today's smartphones has thousands of times more processing power than the computers that guided astronauts to the moon.
The web's earliest architects and pioneers fought for their vision of freedom on the Internet at a time when it was still small forums for conversation and text-based gaming. They thought the web could be adequately governed by its users without their needing to empower anyone to police it.
What turns me on about the digital age, what excited me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop.
You look at marketing: everything that's happening in marketing is digitized. Everything that's happening in finance is digitized. So pretty much every industry, every function in every industry, has a huge element that's driven by information technology. It's no longer discrete.
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