The Faith of Beasts

The elite exist on the shoulders of the unremarkable.

Come on,” Campar said. “Let’s be alive for a little bit. If we hate it, we can always die later.

There’s never been an era you’d feel safe putting a baby into

Consider that this isn’t a problem we can fix. By ourselves, we don’t have the power. It’s never your responsibility to do something that can’t be done. You do your part, and you help the next generation carry it a little farther, and then the one after that.

his mind was shifting inside his skull like a feral monkey trapped in a house, bouncing from window to window looking for a way out that didn’t exist.

a brittle soul of the type only small men who become bullies ever achieve.

being at the mercy of a cruel and indifferent universe could only be a surprise once.

We’re all just bundles of evolved instinct and performative bullshit.

Minds are something that bodies do. They’re not just connected, they’re different ways of looking at the same damn thing.

Anything, however strange or astounding, could be made commonplace by repetition.

It's never your responsibility to do something that can't be done. You do your part, and you help the next generation carry it a little farther, and then the one after that.

A mob of spiderlike animals the size of his two fists together wearing uniforms with bright jewels set in them. He thought they were called the People of Sotos. It was funny how many species had names that translated to some version of "The Real Ones" or "The Ones Who Matter".

Nothing is normal in war,” Vaudai said. “It is always an experiment to discover what will undo the last encounter’s defenses and what will defend against the newest angle of attack. One creates the form of the other, and echoes back again in an endless spiral of sophistication and elegance. Conflict is the engine of excellence, and war is the distillation of conflict. It is the grand unfolding that ends in the embrace of eternity. Also, it is like painful defecation and leaves me with an ache. I am going to rest now.

Look on the bright side," Jessyn said. "Maybe it'll go wrong and we'll all die. Then it won't be our problem anymore.

No,” she said. “You’re a grown man. You can pick your own hell, same as anyone.

poorly designed as you. Now this way! This way!

The little black fountain muttered to itself like it had a complaint but not the courage to announce it.

A better man than Rickar was. Probably an indication that he’d die in the war. Good people wore out faster than bastards, the universe using them up like it held a grudge against kindness. Rickar grinned at him. “I’ll be fine.

The clouds shifted, moving too slowly to see the changes but changing all the same. She could relate to that. She wasn’t remotely who she’d been before, and while she had noticed the more dramatic, violent transformations when they’d happened, there were others—deeper ones, she thought—that had come over her too slowly to notice.

Plants that look like plants and bugs that look like bugs. I’ll know more when I can start taking them apart and seeing what they’re made of.” “Plants that look like plants is interesting, though, no? I mean, wouldn’t you expect something different?” “It says more about what kinds of pressures they’re under than anything about the organism. Back on Anjiin, you could mistake oaks and mirrins for each other, and they came up through completely different trees of life. An environment tells you how to live in it.” Garral took a slice of bar off the grill and tossed it between his hands until it cooled enough to eat. “That’s a hell of a thought,” he said, and she thought there was something unexpected in his inflection. Sorrow, maybe. Or anger. “It’s like the way so many organisms that move through water wind up some variation of fish-shaped. Or things that live around light develop eyes. Oxygen makes a great electron acceptor, so if there’s oxygen around, things will use it for respiration. If there’s an atmosphere thick enough, something will figure out how to fly.

I dedicate my life to finding things out, and the thing that breaks me is the one that everyone else has just by default.