“Men, I thought, were more trouble than they were worth. Really, one should stick to books where one sees the hero coming a mile off.”
“Like all intelligent people, she functions very well in extreme disorder.”
“Mama was amazing like that; I spent most of my teenage years assuming that she knew nothing about me, and all of my twenties realizing that she knew everything.”
“There's never any warning that something extraordinary is about to happen, is there?”
“If I could take people out of their heads for a little while, if I could give them a dose of fantasy, that was all that mattered. You can't put a price on escape.”
“Would it ever, ever leave? I had become used to the ache now; it was with me all the time, and never seemed to lessen. Time was no healer, I decided, but it was a great accommodator.”
“As he started 'Whisky and Gin' and the cheering and the shrieking filled my senses, I thought of Mama, shattered by the war and Papa's death and I wished with all my heart that she could understand how it felt to be us that night - how it felt to be eighteen and unbeaten, eighteen and alive.”
“I didn't hear you come in. I was away with the ghosts of my beautiful youth.”
“The odd thing about Mama was that she liked to think of herself as a doomy sort of person, but there was a natural optimism in her that refused to be defeated, however hard she squashed it down, and I know that she never lost faith completely.”
“I love you Denver Beck," she whispered. "I have for a long time." Then she stepped back. "Now it's your turn to decide if you love me.”
“The pair smiled desperately at one another. And for the first time ever, despite the fact that everyone he knew - even the gods themselves - would condemn him for it, Jebel didn't think of Tel Hesani as a slave, but as an equal.”
“Swallow Daughter, pull them in, those words that sit upon your lips. Lock them deep inside your soul, hide them 'til they've time to grow. Close your mouth upon the power, curse not, cure not, 'til the hour. You won't speak and you won't tell, you won't call on heav'n or hell. You will learn and you will thrive. Silence, daughter. Stay alive.”
“There’s been a revival of the old debate: with the failure of the wormholes, should we consider redesigning our minds to encompass interstellar distances? One self spanning thousands of stars, not via cloning, but through acceptance of the natural time scale of the lightspeed lag. Millennia passing between mental events. Local contingencies dealt with by non-conscious systems. I don’t think the idea will gain much support, though – and the new astronomical projects are something of an antidote. We can watch the stars from a distance, as ever, but we have to make peace with the fact that we’ve stayed behind.
I keep asking myself, though: where do we go from here? History can’t guide us. Evolution can’t guide us. The C-Z charter says ”understand and respect the universe”… but in what form? On what scale? With what kind of senses, what kind of minds? We can become anything at all – and that space of possible futures dwarfs the galaxy. Can we explore it without losing our way? Fleshers used to spin fantasies about aliens arriving to ”conquer” Earth, to steal their ”precious” physical resources, to wipe them out for fear of ”competition”… as if a species capable of making the journey wouldn’t have had the power, or the wit, or the imagination, to rid itself of obsolete biological imperatives. ”Conquering the galaxy” is what bacteria with spaceships would do – knowing no better, having no choice.
Our condition is the opposite of that: we have no end of choices. That’s why we need to find another space-faring civilisation. Understanding Lacerta is important, the astrophysics of survival is important, but we also need to speak to others who’ve faced the same decisions, and discovered how to live, what to become. We need to understand what it means to inhabit the universe.”
“I picked up my mocha and stood. The cup was still almost half-full, but I didn't want it anymore. Besides, it was now luke-warm. Which meant I didn't have to worry if it was scalding him when I tossed the remains in Ethan's face.I think Finn might have craked a smileas he held the door open for me, but I wasn't sure.”
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