New Zealand author (1967- )
In time action becomes habit, and habit can wear reason away, leaving no traces.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
Many scholars have complained of our tendency to see history only in conflicts, but I am not convinced they are right. It is in conflict that our values are exposed.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
Attention is a drug. There's no going back.
BERNARD BECKETT
Deep Fried
There's all these people waiting, like waiting for something is enough to make it happen. That's the future, having something to wait for. I'm glad I don't have a future then. I hate waiting.
BERNARD BECKETT
No Alarms
I have learned to value the things others are reluctant to give.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
In the end, living is defined by dying. Bookended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
History has taught us the futility of the conspiracy theory. Complexity gives rise to error, and in error we grow our prejudice.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
Without God, our reason is an accident of the cosmos, as ultimately inconsequential as the spinning of the planet or the pulling of the tides. Reason becomes unimportant, and hence untenable. Without God we have only belief, and yet we are left with nothing to believe in.
BERNARD BECKETT
August
This is always the problem with building heroes. To keep them pure, we must build them stupid. The world is built on compromise and uncertainty, and such a place is too complex for heroes to flourish.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
She remembered brighter days, but never spoke of them. It was one of the Great Mistakes, thinking of brightness as a quality of the past.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
Ideas mutate, and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
For the one belief we all carry with us, no matter how rational we claim to be, is a belief in our own free will.
BERNARD BECKETT
Falling for Science
The idea enters the brain from the outside. It rearranges the furniture to make it more to its liking. It finds other Ideas already in residence, and picks fights or forms alliances. The alliances build new structures, to defend themselves against intruders. And then, whenever the opportunity arises, the Idea sends out its shock troops in search of new brains to infect. The successful Idea travels from mind to mind, claiming new territory, mutating as it goes. It's a jungle out there ... many ideas are lost. Only the strongest survive.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
Superstition is the need to view the world in terms of simple cause and effect.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
The death of a child, the most sorrowful of all the mysteries.
BERNARD BECKETT
August
In her mother's album the activists always looked so relaxed, certain the world would tumble at nothing more than a gentle nudge and the strum of a guitar. Maybe it was the way the sun was always shining in the photographs, or her mother's face, simultaneously eighteen and fifty at the centre of every frame, but it had all seemed so harmless.
BERNARD BECKETT
Acid Song
Talk is never just words.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis
Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved.
BERNARD BECKETT
Genesis