Drunk on All Your Strange New Words

a book with a bookmark inside implies someone has merely gone away, and will be back to finish it soon. Removing the bookmark takes on a horrible finality

The world has enabled so many bullshitters. It's exhausting.

if you can control the stories a culture tells about itself, you can control who they are.

The good thing about carrying on a conversation with a phantom voice projected by some fragment of your shattered subconscious is, you can brush your teeth at the same time.

The world has enabled so many bullshitters.

Now everyone will think she can’t cope with the demands of her job, just because she fell off a balcony.

Lydia’s never met a working translator as old as this before: usually they burn out, go into teaching, change careers (e.g., become drug dealers) or just retire.

You’ve got your answer then, haven’t you?' Lydia nods. She has. She knew it all along. But sometimes it takes an artificially intelligent simulation of a long dead Beatle to put things in perspective.

But maybe people don’t want fantasy, they want to feel they’re in control, that they’re playing by rules they understand and that it’s possible to win.

What’s really notable about the Logi’s refusal to engage with us in our own language and media is how they’ve forced us to communicate on their terms. Our dire economic need to forge a productive relationship with another species has made us accept them and their demands. This gives them a lot more control over how they’re seen, meanwhile forcing us to put all the effort into communication, such as our network of translators.

We’re all busy, all the time.' He’s raising his voice. 'People think it’s all [A.I.'d] now and I sit in my workspace all day reading books and jerking off but it all just makes more work. Everything that was meant to lighten the load makes more work, it just makes more shit for you to deal with.

We take drug abuse very seriously, Lydia.” Abuse? Use, surely. She was using it exactly as intended.

There’s a particular type of alone you feel when in a room with someone who’s no longer alive, she’s discovering now, and it is the worst kind.

Some didn’t trust the truthiness ratings and inevitably claimed it was all just a way of suppressing inconvenient information. Lydia sometimes worries it’s naive of her to set so much store by the TRs, and yeah they probably are manipulating her to some extent, but she needs some way to make the whirlwind of crap manageable. The world has enabled so many bullshitters. It’s exhausting.

when they put up the sea barriers the mayor’s office started slapping protection orders on everything and turned Manhattan into a theme-park version of itself: no life, no change, no danger, just heritage.

When you have the ability to communicate with someone telepathically, people tend to assume you’re talking to them all the time, especially if you’re not visibly doing anything else.