"Where are you going with your life? Here, do you see this? This is my life. ...If I am alive in twenty-nineteen, this is what I will be doing. It does not matter who else is alive at that time. It does not matter if I am the only one alive at that time. It does not matter if I am limbless, sightless, whatever. This is what I will be doing."

"...This is a chart of thoughts."

"These are thoughts that need to be thought out."

"What is this column of numbers?"

"The mythical birth of some hippie in a desert is not the beginning of time for me. This system begins time from the date of my first recorded thought, which corresponds to nineteen-eighty-eight in this Christian system."

"...This goes on for a hundred years. Do you think you're going to live to a hundred and thirty?"

"If I am alive in twenty-one-oh-eight, this is what I will be doing. I don't know if I will be alive in twenty-one-oh-eight, and I don't know if I'll be alive in twenty-oh-nine, but if I am, this is what I will be doing."

"...You think so differently from other people."

"I think. I wonder whether other people think."

"You are such an asshole."

"I plainly am not and cannot be certain whether other people think."

"Because you are a solipsist."

"Because I am the Solipsist. Logic concludes that there is only one for certain."

She was crying again.

“I’ve just never had any use for people. And people get angry when you don’t have any use for them.”

Nocturnal in habit, and thought.

Nobody is interested in my stuff more than I am, and I am not interested in anybody's stuff more than my own.

This is what life is: creating a world for oneself.

Dreams forgotten before you awakened

Each of the humans displayed a facial expression when reading the Black Stone. Each expression was different. Some of the expressions displayed the human’s thoughts and emotions; some of the expressions concealed the human’s thoughts and emotions.

“I’m not happy here. But that doesn’t mean anything. I’m not happy anywhere.”

The imminence of death renders all ambition as foolishness.

...nothing so noble as a good speech well delivered, a good poem well recited, or a good joke well told.

And we want to believe there is something, and there's nothing, there's nothing.

It is uncommon for an animal to destroy itself. It is common for a human to destroy itself. What differentiates an animal from a human? A human is capable of philosophically examining the phenomenon of existence. Though hindered by an animal-like lust for survival, a human can comprehend the vanity of existence.

Can I carry my heart in a bag, and throw it into a river?

He saw the God, the Creator, the Merciful and Unmerciful, the Terrible, the Loving, the All-Mighty Devilish Unimaginable Horror. He saw the Power emanating from the Center, permeating into the Everywhere.

He saw nothing.

“She could be like, ‘Radigan, I had sex with—’ No, she would say, ‘Rad-ee-gan?’ And I would say, ‘**-**-***?’ And she would giggle. So she could be like, ‘Rad-ee-gan, I had sex with the air force.’ And I would be like, ‘I forgive you, Baby.’”

“That good?”

“That good.”

“So what happened?”

“What always happens.”

Do not try to hold onto what you have, because you have nothing.

The story of every human life is a tragedy.

"A popular social philosopher wrote, 'You show me the people who control the money, the land, and the weapons, and I’ll show you the people in charge.' Everyone at this party is a member of American society. Is anyone at this party in charge of American society? No. They are here pursuing their petty pleasures. Next workday morn, they will go back to their petty roles in support of the people in charge, insensible to the suffering that their society causes in faraway deserts. Little Eichmanns we are, and grotesque is our merry-making."

Today, tomorrow, forever.

You don't know me. You have dreams of me. I am monstrous. Humans are monstrous.

Suicide is an aspect of the human condition whose exploration cannot be exhausted.

I am edgily Buddhist. Life is suffering. Desire is the source of all suffering. The only way to be free of suffering is to give up desire.

I abandon. I walk away. I don't know of anything that I have ever had that I believed was worth the effort.

There is no meaning nor purpose to existence. You must create meaning or purpose for your life. But any meaning or purpose that you create for yourself is only just that: created. It is imaginary.

You almost died, and you didn’t, but it does not matter. If you had died, it would not have mattered. It would have mattered to a few people, oh so very few people, for only a little while, such a little while. And then they would exist without you. And everything would exist without you. And it doesn’t matter. You will still die anyway. And everything and everyone will exist without you.

We live by our thoughts.

I don’t remember life. It’s something that happened between breakfast and another breakfast.

I am not an entertainer. I do not care whether you are entertained by my writing. I am presenting ideas.

The greatest horror of the Holocaust is that it will be repeated.

. . . on larger and larger scales, for as long as humans exist.

Life hasn’t even begun yet. Everything that came before: nothing to what is yet to come.

I’d like to support those kinds of books, the kind that could never be popular, the kind that cut you when you pick them up.

The wine glass slid off the bar and onto the floor and shattered. I could only look at it. Another broken glass. How many glasses had I broken in my life?

Whatever you think is so great, isn’t.

Whatever else we are, we are petty little bastards, and we will forever hopelessly be that way.

I am not a part of a country, I am a part of humanity. I do not care about the fate of the United States or Mongolia or any other ephemeral nation, culture, group. My aspirations are for all of humanity.

Everyone is expendable, everyone is replaceable.

The only one whose existence is important is the ukhaan (the self, the one, the consciousness), and the only one to whom the ukhaan’s existence is important is the ukhaan.

A conscious entity is not and cannot be certain whether anything other than itself exists.

Yes, you can go about living your life just fine without thinking about this.

But if you do think about this, you cannot go about living your life just fine.

Paradox, anomy, horror: conscious existence can only be endured through willfully ignoring the only knowable characteristic of conscious existence.

Awareness of existence is disturbing.

To do anything requires the destruction of me.

The best stories I have encountered... are about meaninglessness, anomy, universal arbitrariness... and occasional human cruelty, human insanity in the face of that.

Full burn.

No, not sick; in poor health.

No, not in poor health; in a bad way.

“It is original. There is nothing else like it. I know. I have been searching my whole life.”

I don’t feel that I’m even writing for humans. Humans are too ensconced in the viscerality of their physical existences: humans are eating, defecating, copulating animals, and as such, might ever be lackadaisical in the contemplation of the nature of consciousness. But the future consciousnesses, existing in digital worlds, freed from the distractions and limitations of flesh-prisons, abstract and pure, might be given to exploring the fundamental questions of mind and existence. Maybe I’m writing for them.

Stories of redemption are the most obscene of fantasies, the fiction furthest from truth. Every act that has been committed will always have been committed. Death is the only end to every story.

The tragedy is not that existence is arbitrary; the tragedy is that you ever became aware of existence in the first place.

I am composed mainly of dissipation.

“Who are you?”
“I am.”

Uh-huh, I see. Have you read my book? It explains everything.

Of course everything is not okay. Everything is never okay. Everything can never be okay.

...just how self-absorbed everyone is. ... Ha, ha, “self-absorbed.” That is humorful because, in a literal sense, no one can be as self-absorbed as me, who doubts logically the existence of anything other than me. A distinction between everyone else and myself is that I do not believe that my chief interest—my self—is of interest to anyone other than myself. Why do I write? It is not to shock anyone with the comprehension of the very real possibility that I might be the only thing that exists; it is to shock someone with the comprehension of the very real possibility that she or he might be the only thing that exists.

What is even more shocking, indeed debilitating? The comprehension of the intractable fact that I do not and cannot know whether I am the only thing that exists. Is not the absoluteness of uncertainty terrifying? If you have faith in the existence of something—anything—beyond yourself, then this question does not apply to you. But if you are mercilessly rational, then the hopelessness of all-pervading unknowability must catch up with you. Faith is for the weak-minded. But who is strong-minded enough to accept knowledgelessness and unknowability? Baatar, the impossible hero of The Steppe, is sufficiently strong-minded... Baatar, who is, in all outward appearances, insane...

There is something wrong with life.

The question is not why did I forego the celebration. The question is why have I not shot myself in the head. We can argue that suicide is the assumption of responsibility for the circumstances and timing of your own death. How can we be content to leave the event of death to happenstance?

For how long will I continue to endure consciousness? Why have I endured consciousness this long?

There is the Skepticist/Baatarist dilemma that I cannot be certain whether my consciousness will end with the gunblast. To destroy my brain in the hope of ending my ukhaan would be to give in to irrationality, to place faith in the unprovable superstition that the perceived functioning constitution of seemingly material neurology is the source of consciousness. All that is and can be certain is that my ukhaan exists now. Such is the nature of existence, of life, of consciousness.

I’m not interested in creating literature; I’m writing the bible.

If you live, you are mine. If you think, your thoughts belong to me.

The application of reason is hopeless.

“Two things cannot!” She looked down at the table. “Bread and water cannot share the same space.”
“Yes they can. It’s called soggy bread.”
“Earth and air cannot share the same space.”
“Yes they can. It’s called a duststorm.”
She stepped closer to me. “Two people cannot share the same space.”
“That’s called sex,” I said.
“You are wrong. Water cannot be a part of bread. Earth cannot be a part of air. You cannot be a part of me.”
“I’ll prove it to you,” I said. I cupped the base of her skull in my hand and closed her hair in my fist.

He went straight to the microwave. He opened the door of the microwave and pulled out the cat and dropped it to the floor. He crushed the cat’s skull under his bootheel, ending the beast’s misery as quickly as possible. He hadn’t noticed yet that he had burned both of his hands when he had grabbed the cat. He was furious.

I'm not all here. I'm in little scattered pieces.

Acceptance of the Bundle Theory of Personhood eradicates any fear of death, for if death is occurring in every moment, then the final death is no change of state. Acceptance of the Bundle Theory of Personhood also eradicates any motivation to action, for if death is occurring in every moment, then what can ever be achieved?

What you term “success” is wholly the inducement of other people to give you things: to give you money, to give you love, to give you recognition. But what if other people do not exist?

You live in a world where you can’t see death coming, but it is coming.

If I had dreams, they would be of you.

No one cheers when the sun rises.

“Does he not care about other people because he doubts their existence, or does he doubt the existence of other people because he does not care about them?”

I am confident that I am producing works that will be read as long as there are consciousnesses, human or otherwise.

Suffering is ingenerate in human life; suffering is ingenerate in consciousness.

I do not feel loss for what I do not have, and I have nothing. Death is no cause for dole, because it is only the loss of time--potential time--time that does not belong to me now and is not and cannot be promised to me.

“No, no, I wouldn’t bother with that. If I liked you, I would simply seduce you.”
“Oh really? Just like that, huh? You think it would be so easy?”
“Well, if success were guaranteed, it wouldn’t be much fun, would it?” she said to me.

We do what we must to survive. But why? Why is survival so all-important? No, I do not have to do what I have little desire to do. I can just die.

The inquiry reveals as much about the inquirer as the response reveals about the respondent.

But so many years have burned away, and so many bad things have happened that never needed to happen, and the bad things will continue to happen.

I don’t believe in everlasting love, unless it can be known only as everlasting pain. I don’t believe in love, but I believe in women who believe in love.

Other humans might exist as conscious entities, or they might not. But the crux—the crippling, debilitating crux—is that I do not and cannot know whether other humans exist as conscious entities. They might, or they might not, but I—by dint of simply being conscious—exist in unresolvable uncertainty.

Skepticism is primary to all Western philosophy, Ancient and Modern: in Ancient times, beginning with the Greek Skeptics; in Modern times, beginning with Rene Descartes. Yet despite the fundamental nature of Skepticism to Western philosophy, the ideas and—especially—the implications of Skepticism remain alien to most humans, non-Westerners and Westerners alike.

But not to me. They strangle my mind. They are best represented by monsters.

I am unconvinced and inconvincible that other humans exist as conscious entities. That rather hampers interpersonal relations.

As technology makes perfectly simulated virtual universes a fact, the most vital human intellectual endeavor is inquiry into how a conscious mind can discern a physical universe.

The notion that one might be the only conscious mind in existence, known as the “Problem of Other Minds” in the Western philosophical tradition, known to Western psychology as “Solipsism Syndrome,” is abhorrently alien to any human who lives with other humans, as almost all humans do. Yet this same notion is so natural to any human in solitude that it is a primary concern of space agency research into how humans can live in vast, empty, extraterrestrial landscapes.

The Steppe is an exploration of the horror and glory of a human accepting that which is humanly unacceptable, yet logically undeniable.

I am here, wracked, my body rotting out from under me... All is pain...

"Do you believe in eternity?"
"No."
"Do you believe in death?"
"No."
"That's rather paradoxical."
"Isn't it, though?"

Have no fear of the solitude.

Fear the creatures.

There're always expectations. But never hopes. All is hopeless.

Whence to where?

The rats, the pigeons, the roaches, and the humans persist.

I grew up on a farm in North Dakota. By the time I was 16 years old, I had killed more wild animals than most humans will see in their lives.

The ukhaan exists now...horror and glory.

Nothing matters. To invest time and energy into anything is only to waste time and energy.

Philosophy is everything.
Physics is everything.
Chemistry is everything.
Biology is everything.
Mathematics is everything.
Engineering is everything.

Everything is marketing.

I do not eat, I do not sleep; I do not understand how it is that I continue to exist as I do.

I do not wonder that I am not loved. To be loved, one must love. To love is too high a price to pay to be loved.

July is the worst month. Everything happens in July.

You do not care about what I think. You care about what I can make you think.

There is something I must comprehend, and yet it is incomprehensible.

I contemplate existence and am horrified.

“Man is horrific enough to man; there is no need to invent horrors.”
“I do not invent horrors; I describe them.”

When we die, our memories are all we have. We make those memories now. But too many of our nows are exactly like other nows, and there is nothing memorable about them.

Whatever was, is not now.

Life is a death sentence.

Have you ever found yourself alive, and been surprised? That happens to me, every moment.

There is no and can be no “insanity.” The idea of “insanity” is that your reality differs from a consensus reality. But if you cannot be certain—and you cannot be certain—that a consensus reality exists, because you cannot be certain that other ukhaans exist, then the existence of your reality is of primary importance and whether your reality corresponds with any other reality that may or may not exist is of no importance. My reality is reality, and this is not an esoteric, obscure, off-the-wall idea; it is derived from humanity’s most basic philosophical ponderings, our first recorded inquiries into the nature of consciousness, our first questions of what it is to be alive.

The answer is that to be alive is to be alone.

To create art means that some people will love you, and some people will hate you. But just as the desire for love is no reason to create art, the fear of hate is no reason to not create art.

There is no construction nor destruction, no creation nor depletion; there is only existence.

The great darkness said: “I am the crush of all things.”
Baatar replied: “You cannot be, for I am the crush of all things.”