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How to say that they alone in all that rocky world were alive, their faces glowing like paper lanterns in the light? How to say that even if living creatures were no more than carriers for ruthless genes, this was still somehow better than the blank mineral nothingness of everything else?
Buildings express values, they have a sort of grammar, and rooms are the sentences.
They wanted a bath—in their old aquatic dolphin brains, down below the cerebrums, down where desires were primal and fierce, they wanted back into water.
Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.
Arkady ignored her and said, “Beauty is power and elegance, right action, form fitting function, intelligence, and reasonability. And very often,” he grinned and pushed at her belly, “expressed in curves.”
Consciousness was just a thin lithosphere over a big hot core, after all.
Very few people ever bother to find out what other people really think. They are willing to accept whatever they are told about anyone sufficiently distant.”
you never really summon all of your strength until you know that there’s no way back, no way to go but onward.”
the pleasure and stability of dining rooms had always occurred against such a backdrop, against the catastrophic background of universal chaos; such moments of calm were things as fragile and transitory as soap bubbles, destined to burst almost as soon as they blew into existence. Groups of friends, rooms, streets, years, none of them would last. The illusion of stability was created by a concerted effort to ignore the chaos they were imbedded in.
