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When Laurence was old enough to do what he liked, he would be old enough to understand he couldn’t do what he liked.
her face upcast, trying to keep pace with an unkindness of ravens passing over
The ravens flew in no formation Patricia could discern, even though most of the school’s lessons, this first week, had been about finding patterns in everything. Patterns were how you answered standardized-test questions, how you committed large blocks of text to memory, and ultimately how you created structure in your life. (This was the famous Saarinian Program.)
“Your friend would control nature,” said the Tree, rustling through each syllable one by one. “A witch must serve nature.”
“Control,” the Tree said, “is an illusion.”
Faith is to religion as love is to ____”),
“A society that has to burn witches to hold itself together is a society that has already failed, and just doesn’t know it yet.”
CH@NG3M3: Worry is often a symptom of imperfect information.
CH@NG3M3: Society is the choice between freedom on someone else’s terms and slavery on yours.
ONE DAY THE Singularity would elevate humans to cybernetic superbeings, and maybe then people would say what they meant. Probably not, though.
“You know … no matter what you do, people are going to expect you to be someone you’re not. But if you’re clever and lucky and work your butt off, then you get to be surrounded by people who expect you to be the person you wish you were.”
“I think I just got bored with it,” Isobel said. “Boredom is the mind’s scar tissue.”
“I think that the most basic thing of ethics is being aware of how your actions affect others, and having an awareness of what they want and how they feel. And that’s always going to depend on who you’re dealing with.”
his life story was the story of Patricia and him, after all, for better or worse, and if she ended his life might go on, but his story would be over.
