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A half-dozen times she has stared at this painting, and each time something stirs inside her, some inarticulable sense of the pull of distant places, of the immensity of the world and her own smallness inside it.
Each morning comes along and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes.
“there is no bad weathers, only bad clothes.”
A mile away mice drowse inside the cabin where he and Papa spent their first Lakeport winter. The heart heals but never completely.
The Argos is an interstellar generation ship shaped like a disk. No windows, no stairs, no ramps, no elevators.
They step into a cylindrical vault fourteen feet across and sixteen feet high. At the center, Sybil hangs suspended inside her tube.
They powder their teeth and brush their hair
I thought we were selected for higher cognitive reasoning? I thought we were supposed to have suppressed imaginative faculties.”
Wind carries the smoke out over the platform. “Fear of the thing,” Maher murmurs, more to himself than to Omeir, “will be more powerful than the thing itself.”
“The things that look fixed in the world, child—mountains, wealth, empires—their permanence is only an illusion. We believe they will last, but that is only because of the brevity of our own lives.
From the perspective of God, cities like this come and go like anthills.
“He is magnanimous in all ways, and will listen to anyone who wishes to speak with him at any hour of the day,”
Two clouds separate and sunlight spills onto the street, and Seymour glances to his left, and the bodies of what might be fifty thousand earthworms catch the light.
The pines drip; the asphalt steams; the worms thrash.
Pick up the pace. Forty-three worms forty-four forty-five. He expects the truck to stop, an adult to climb out, wave the boy over, offer an explanation. The truck keeps going.
For now the big dead ponderosa still stands.
She says they even purchased the crumbling old Victorian next to the library and plan to remodel it as a showroom.
“A lot of folks in Lakeport,” says Marian, “are excited about Eden’s Gate.” “Why?” She gives him a sad smile. “Well, you know what they say.” He chews his shirt collar. He doesn’t know what they say. “Money isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”
woman wearing sunglasses jerks a thumb toward the back of the library and says, “I think your toilet is overflowing,” and Marian hurries away.
Juxtaposition w the money and unsupported library
Between 365 million and one billion birds die just from crashing into windows in the United States each year.
descended from the trees and walked circles around the deceased for fifteen minutes.
turn its face to the trunk, and stand motionless for several days until it died.
you drop like shadow into the daylight, as one more safe harbor is wrenched out of the world.
He closes his eyes and sees Trustyfriend cruise over a wasteland of endless
parking lots, nowhere to hunt, nowhere to land, nowhere to sleep.
Mother has embroidered a little Bosnian pine on the collar to match the two-and-a-half-year-old seedling growing inside Farm 4.
it smells of the rarest thing: newness.
Even the thing that holds all the information can’t synthesize anything new. Similar to the falseness and lifelessness of AI.
“We’ll never—?” “That’s right, child. We know that Beta Oph2 has an atmosphere like Earth’s, that it has liquid water like Earth does, that it probably has forests of some type. But we will never see them. None of us will. We are the bridge generations, the intermediaries, the ones who do the work so that our descendants will be ready.”
The weeds! Weeds with leaves like the blades of Mother’s sewing scissors, weeds with leaves shaped like Jessi Ko’s eyes, weeds with tiny purple flowers on tiny green stems—how many times has Father reminisced about the glories of weeds?
“The only solid thing in the Atlas is the ground. As I said, once the children try the newer things, they hardly ever come back.”
“You and I will never reach Beta Oph2, dear, and that is a painful truth. But in time you will come to believe that there is nobility in being a part of an enterprise that will outlast you.”
A thought, or a reconsidered memory, strikes her: of the ten-year-olds before her, like Mother, who were born on board, who woke up on their Library Days dreaming of the hour they’d set foot on Beta Oph2 and take a breath outside the Argos, the shelters they’d build, the mountains they’d climb, the life-forms they might discover—a second Earth!—and then they come out of their compartments after their Library Day looking different, valleys in their foreheads, shoulders drooped, lamps dimmed in their eyes. They stopped running down corridors, took SleepDrops at NoLight; sometimes she’d catch
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When she thinks of the younger children darting down the corridors right now, on their way to Third Meal, a long ache runs through her like a blade.
“Each of these books, child, is a door, a gateway to another place and time. You have your whole life in front of you, and for all of it, you’ll have this. It will be enough, don’t you think?”
Anna watches and wonders: To what saints’ days will bishops wear brocaded copes if the time of man on earth is ending?
“There are many people in this world,” Himerius says, “who do not care to what purposes their engines are put. So long as they are paid.”
Himerius drops the sack. For a moment in the dawn light he looks hunched and gray, the old man he won’t live long enough to become.
Anna remembers something Chryse once said: The houses of the rich burn quick as any other.
“But how will he ever find a wife?” Nida asked once. “With that face of his?” “It’s not going to be his face that stops them,” Grandfather said, “it’ll be the odor of his toes,” and grabbed one of Omeir’s feet and brought it to his nose and took a big whiff, and everyone laughed, and Grandfather dragged the boy into a great embrace.
Which, she wonders, will be more effective at keeping out invaders: mortar or prayer?
All her life she has been told to believe, tried to believe, wanted to believe, that if a person suffers long enough, works hard enough, then she—like Ulysses washing up on the shore of the kingdom of brave Alcinous—will ultimately reach a better place. That through suffering we are redeemed. That by dying we live again.
And maybe in the end that’s the easier thing. But Anna is tired of suffering. And she is not ready to die.
it was so cold that when the hairy wildmen who lived there spoke, their words froze and their companions would have to wait for spring to hear what had been said.
“Boil the words you already know down to their bones,” Rex says, “and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.”
“Imagine how it felt to hear the old songs about heroes returning home. To believe that it was possible.”
“It’s not so much the contents of the song. It’s that the song was still being sung.”
“That’s what the gods do,” he says, “they spin threads of ruin through the fabric of our lives, all to make a song for generations to come.”
He hides his face in his pillow. Five months ago the hillside beyond the wire was home to red squirrels black finches pygmy shrews garter snakes downy woodpeckers swallowtail butterflies wolf lichen monkey flowers ten thousand voles five million ants. Now what is it?
Syntax
He can hardly keep his feet. His finger slides out of the safety ring. The moon is still there in the sky but it might fall at any moment.
In the Atlas I have found two places where you can see so many of them that they turn a whole field white.”
Most ppl ignore the atlas after the first visit
