Seveneves

by Neal Stephenson

But this was how the mind worked. The mind couldn’t think about the End of the World all the time. It needed the occasional break, a romp through the trivial. Because it was through trivia that the mind was anchored in reality, as the largest oak tree was rooted, ultimately, in a system of rootlets no larger than the silver hairs on the president’s head.

The qualifications for being a Scout seemed to be a shocking level of physical endurance, a complete disregard for mortal danger, and some knowledge of how to exist in a space suit. All of them were Russian.

“We are just proceeding adaptively to leverage our core competencies.”

“Those of us who are going to live,” Dinah said, “have to start living by our own lights.”

“This is how far we will go to achieve separation from the world.”

It was one thing to be fed a line of religious hokum in a desert hellhole that had nothing to recommend it as a site for tourism. But in order to go for a few hours’ walk with a king in Shangri-La, he would put up with any amount of fairy tales and metaphysical ramblings.

A thunder of helicopter blades would announce their departure, and after that the family members would get vague assurances that Dorji and Jigme were going into space to carry forward the cultural legacy of Bhutan. Assurances that, Doob was pretty sure, were going to be fundamentally dishonest. These people were going to go to their deaths in fifteen months consoling themselves with that belief.

They would do it if they could be made to believe it would protect them.

“You’re trying to sell me the idea that there is such a thing as a state of nature that humans were designed to live in. It is the ‘dirt is good’ hypothesis.”

The tick-tock curriculum had dissolved and been replaced by activities improvised from day to day by teachers and parents: hiking in the mountains, doing art projects about the Cloud Ark, talking with psychologists about death, reading favorite books.

If you hid your feelings well enough, it actually changed you.

But I have to warn you that this is the word—‘politics’—that nerds use whenever they feel impatient about the human realities of an organization.”

Time, tide, and comets waited for no man.

She excused herself from what had become a very strange kaffeeklatsch.

The algorithms worked, but they wouldn’t get better unless humans gardened them; and to do that, you had to fly.

She was a fly hitching a ride on a hurricane.

Mutatis mutandis,

It boiled down to Amistics. In the decades before Zero, the Old Earthers had focused their intelligence on the small and the soft, not the big and the hard, and built a civilization that was puny and crumbling where physical infrastructure was concerned, but astonishingly sophisticated when it came to networked communications and software.

In the same way that certain people of Old Earth, raised on the Bible, would have referred to masturbation as the Sin of Onan, those of the modern world tended to classify personal virtues and failings in terms of well-known historical figures from the era of the Cloud Ark, the Big Ride, and the first generations on Cleft.

“All duty is inconvenient to a greater or lesser degree, or it would not be duty.”

Fighting isn’t about knowing how. It’s about deciding to.