Ruins

So this is love, he said to himself, trying to examine his own overwhelming feelings with the rational fragment of his mind. This is the powerful, horrible longing that made Mother marry that miserable tyrant I had to call Father. How many unbelievably stupid heroes in stories did insanely dangerous things because they were in love? More to the pint, how many insane things am I going to do because of it?

We are who we are. When changes come, we start with what we are right then, and then we work to try to become whoever we need to be.

Could you possibly be a little more incoherent?" asked Olivenko. "There are bits of this I'm almost understanding, and I'm sure that's not what you have in mind.

There is nothing that doesn't decay. Some things decay more slowly than others, that's all.

Oh, people get used to so many things," said Vadesh, "if only they give them selves a chance.

It’s a stupid leader who can’t turn follower when somebody offers him a wiser course.

It’s a lot more fun to hear stories about other people than to live through them yourself, Umbo decided. Because when somebody told you a story, he knew how it was going to come out. He wouldn’t tell it to you if it wasn’t worth telling, if it didn’t amount to something. But when you’re living through it, you don’t know if it’s going to come out well, or even matter at all.

Life is the soul,” said Loaf. “Living things have souls, have minds, have thought. Living individuals have their own relationship to the planet they dwell on. Their past is dragged along with their world through space and time. But it persists. Long after the organism dies, its path remains, and all that it was can be recovered, every moment it lived through can be seen, can be revisited.

Humans make a machine, and then fool themselves into believing that their own brains are no better than the machines. This allows them to believe that their creation, the computer, is as brilliant as their own minds. But it’s a ridiculous self-deception. Computers aren’t even in the same league.

Expendable Ram says, ‘Good.’” “Expendable Ram can eat poo,” said Rigg. “All expendables can process any organic matter they ingest and extract energy from it.

Yes, he was alone, but he needed to be alone; until now, he had not really understood how painful and heavy it was to have the needs of others always in his heart and on his mind.

When changes come, we start with what we are right then, and then we work to try to become whoever we need to be.

When armies benefit from being perceived as necessary, and war provides a means of gaining prestige and leverage over the government,” said Loaf. “Then victory ends a very profitable game. So you play the game of war only fervently enough to keep your military budget high. Nations can get used to a fairly high level of combat attrition without noticing or caring that nobody’s actually trying to win, and nothing but the lives of a few soldiers is at stake.