The Fractal Prince (Jean le Flambeur, #2)

by Hannu Rajaniemi

‘I am very old,’ she says. ‘I know a lot of names.’ What kind of game is Matjek playing here? The wind tugs at her hat, and the sand is warm under her toes. Plankton lights up in her footsteps, like stars. ‘What are you doing, Matjek?’ she whispers. Suddenly, age returns to his eyes. ‘I’m trying to find something,’ he says. ‘Something I lost a long time ago.’ ‘It’s a disease, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Trying to cling on to lost things.’ He looks at her, with a cruel humour in his eyes. ‘Yes. Yes, it is.’

It's hard to capture the mood/context for this quote, but the line: ‘It’s a disease, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘Trying to cling on to lost things.’ had a powerful resonance for me as I went through a tough loss. If you read Robinson's Mars series, you may recall a bit where the characters are so old they basically different people, their memory does not have the capacity to hold on to much of their previous life, as if your first 100 years were your teen/young adult years, and you had forgotten them all to make room for the next 2-300 years worth of life memories...

‘Son,’ says the Green Soldier. ‘There is no point in being upset if you are not prepared to do something about it.’