If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it's because I'm also a realist.

If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it's because I'm also a realist.

Is there any evidence to the contrary? I don't need certainty in order to act on a well-founded suspicion.

Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.

Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.

From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states - the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. "Reality" - history as we had known or inferred it - was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.

It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel's ass.