Author:: Ken Liu
Full Title:: Invisible Planets
Tags:#media/book
- themes::
- theme 1
- Summary::
- summary 1
* highlights from 2021-06-06
* Science fiction is the literature of dreams, and texts concerning dreams always say something about the dreamer, the dream interpreter, and the audience. ([Location 31](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=31))
* If someone would just get a revolt started, I’m sure all of us together can whip him. Everyone else thought the exact same thing, so nothing happened. ([Location 215](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=215))
* The woods are full of eyes, and the grass is full of whispers. ([Location 351](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=351))
* “I think the rats didn’t do anything wrong. They’re just like us, doing the best they can in this world. But our role is to chase them, and their role is to be chased. If we swapped roles, it would make no difference.” ([Location 403](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=403)) ^W8aNFGvC_
* No single factor means anything. Everything has to be contextualized. There are too many hidden relationships, too many disguised opportunities for profit, too many competing concerns. This is the most complicated chess game in the world, the Great Game. ([Location 440](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=440))
* “Living is so … like a dream.” ([Location 570](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=570))
* highlights from 2021-06-07
* Now I’m back. I have a car, a house—everything a man should have, including erectile dysfunction and insomnia. If happiness and time are the two axes of a graph, then I’m afraid the curve of my life has already passed the apex and is on its inexorable way down to the bottom. ([Location 662](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=662))
* The ancient city at night is filled with the spirit of consumerism, but we can’t find anywhere we want to go. ([Location 700](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=700))
* “Swim, swim, swim. Before you know it, life is over.” I repeat the same words I said ten years ago. “Just like us,” she says. “This is the hidden meaning of life,” I say. “At least we still can choose how to live.” ([Location 709](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=709))
* “You’re often anxious because you hate the feeling of the seconds slipping away from you. ([Location 777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=777))
* I seem to have also become a robot musician. I strain to play my foolish song of seduction, but she sees through me with no effort. I have nothing in my chest but a mechanical heart made of iron. ([Location 814](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=814))
* A man is such a strange animal: fear and desire are expressed by the same organ. For the former, he loses control of the organ and it lets out urine; for the latter, he loses control of the organ and it fills with blood. ([Location 817](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=817))
* stare at her bright eyes, like a pair of fireflies, in the darkness. “Come and look at the fish in the waterways with me. Maybe they’re the only creatures in this world who live real lives.” ([Location 887](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=887))
* The people below throng like a nest of ants controlled by an invisible hand, divide into a few groups, are stuffed into the different squares: time flies past the laborer, the poor, the “third world”; time crawls for the rich, the idle, the “developed world”; time stays still for those in charge, the idols, the gods … ([Location 914](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=914)) ^YI9iJY4c8
* I look to the left and then to the right. I’m frightened. I have no way to pick. Mocking laughter. I lunge and grab both fists and force the fingers open. Both are empty, both are lies. ([Location 919](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=919))
* highlights from 2021-06-12
* Because the rent is cheap, every kind of migrant can be found here, struggling to fulfill their Shenzhen dream: the high-tech, high-salaried, high-resolution, high-life, high-Shenzhen. ([Location 945](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=945))
* Sin is like wine. The more it is hidden from sunlight, the more it ferments, growing more potent. ([Location 1031](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=1031))
* highlights from 2021-07-21
* Every ghost used to be alive. Their fake mechanical bodies host real souls. But I’m fake throughout, inside and outside. From the day I was born, made, I was fake. Every ghost has stories of when they were alive, but I don’t. Every ghost had a father, a mother, a family, memories of their love, but I don’t have any of that. ([Location 1441](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=1441))
* Pretending that the fake is real only makes the real seem fake. ([Location 1448](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=1448))
* The world in the game is so different from the world around me, she thought. In the game, a person just died. They didn’t get sick, and they didn’t sit in a wheelchair. ([Location 1579](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=1579))
* Of course, such a plan had its risks: privacy and security, misuse of telepresence by criminals, malfunctions and accidents, just for starters. But since the technological change was already here, it was best to face the consequences and guide them to desirable ends. ([Location 1769](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=1769))
* But now, with Ah Fu, everyone was out and about, doing things. No one had imagined that Ah Fu could be put to all these uses. No one had thought that men and women in their seventies and eighties could still be so creative and imaginative. ([Location 1777](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=1777))
* No matter how heavily it rained outside, the little bears of the village always lived together happily. Maybe everything else in the world was fake; maybe only the world of the little bears was real. ([Location 1817](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=1817))
* You made me understand that living with an awareness of the closeness of death is nothing to be afraid of. ([Location 1883](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=1883))
* Finally, across thousands of miles, he came here to become a new legend to be passed down through the ages. Tradition and modernity, myth and technology, the East and the West—which is his old country, which the new? ([Location 1935](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=1935))
* Now it is a deep canyon whose craggy walls are formed from an amalgam of bricks, steel, concrete, and trees, the product of mixing the inorganic with the organic, decay with life, reality with dream, the steel-and-glass metropolis with ancient myths. ([Location 1950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=1950))
* the dragon-horse spirit closes his wings like a dewdrop falling from the heavens. When you sing, the world will listen; when you are quiet, you’ll hear the song of all creation. ([Location 2178](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B01E3PFTXK&location=2178))