Axiom's End

Yes, it would look like she was smuggling an ostrich with a tarp on it into a motel room, but this also looked like the type of establishment to not particularly judge for that sort of thing.

Why, God, why had she listened to “Fergalicious” instead of the news?

...she was struck suddenly that he wasn’t unfathomable at all. They were both made of the same star stuff. The same primordial fires that had coalesced to form their respective planets had been so close, on a grand cosmic scale. A near-infinite universe, and they were practically next-door neighbors. Looking into his eyes was like looking into ten billion years of history, like she could see the particles and rocks and gasses coalesce over eons, until somehow, impossibly, here they both were.

You refuse to accept that you do not live in a just world. Sooner or later, you will have to.

I feel like an addict. Like if you leave, I'll go into withdrawal.

digging through her purse airily as though she’d misplaced a memory.

Renewed religious fervor and fanaticism bloomed in the wake of the Black Death. Some Europeans targeted groups such as Jews, foreigners, beggars, lepers, and Romani, thinking that they were to blame. Attacks on Jewish communities became commonplace. In February of 1349, the citizens of Strasbourg murdered half of their population of 2,000 Jews. In August of 1349, the Jewish communities in Mainz and Cologne were exterminated.

Hope for the best; prepare for the worst.

Cora gulped down the last bit of pancake, already starting to ache from having very rapidly eaten the whole plate. The whole plate.

Like remember in the ’90s how everyone was like, ‘Vote for me, I’ll be tough on crime’?” said Sol. “Well, it’s like that, but now it’s ‘Vote for me, I’ll be tough on aliens.’” If there was any color left in Cora’s face, it was gone now. “But … they don’t even know what they’re dealing with?” Sol snorted. “This is America. When has that ever stopped us?

Eli was a scene kid, the type that was just a little too into Panic! at the Disco to be trusted.

Having washed the blood off her neck and face, she might have passed for merely a hot mess.

replace the tiered chiffon maxi dress with jeans and a My Chemical Romance T-shirt on clearance. Which, okay. Fine. At least it wasn’t Nickelback.

If an alien species has the power and technology to even get here, then it stands to reason that they have the power and technology to do terrible things. That doesn’t mean terrible things are inevitable or that we’d see them in our lifetime. But what do we do with the knowledge that terrible things are possible, if not inevitable?

The color of its skin seemed even more a thing not found in nature, at least not on Earth,

Maybe it didn’t get tiny day-to-day human ceremonials like courtesy or wearing a bra,

They represent your own government,” he said. “Why are you afraid of your own government?

You might as well try to translate dolphin song without a dolphin-to-English dictionary.

Black olives. The answer to the eternal quandary of what if one were to combine snails and old tires into a foodstuff. The only way the creature could have punished her more brutally was if it had forced celery on her.

How does one travel to the peanut?

It’s easy to assign blame to the American government for the global financial catastrophe we are witnessing unfold, and that is not wrong. Lies on this scale being uncovered were bound to cause mass existential crises, and what better way to exemplify mass existential crises in our neoliberal capitalist dystopia than a series of bank runs?