Steampunk! An Anthology of Fantastically Rich and Strange Stories

She shone like a bright strange star shining in those empty lifeless halls, I write.

I helped Master Crawford, the watchmaker, now that his sight had gone and faded to a thin pinpoint of light. That were my favorite time. I loved the beauty of all them parts working perfectly together, a little world that could be put to rights with the click of gears, like time itself answered to your fingers. “There is a beauty to the way things work. Remove one part, add another, you’ve changed the mechanism

Real invention is a process of repeated, crushing failure that leads, very rarely, to a success. If you want to succeed faster, there’s nothing for it but to fail faster and better.

Some writers write to escape reality. Others write to understand it. But the best writers write in order to take possession of reality, and so transform it.

our minds are the machines we must dismantle and rebuild in order to grasp the infinite.

Time is many things, her father told her. Time is a circle, and time is a great turning gear that cannot be stopped, and time is a river that carries away what you love.

Mam said I was growing up. I felt that I was dying.

Our eyes are always blind when they view the future.

It worked because I asked justly. Magic makes judgments. Remember that.

If you want to succeed faster, there’s nothing for it but to fail faster and better.

We’re reminders that people shouldn’t feel too smug. That what you think you own, you don’t. That life can change just like that.” Fadwa snapped her fingers.