Empress of Forever

by Max Gladstone

To call the scale of space overwhelming is to commit criminal understatement: space is overwhelming in the sense that a human sacrifice splayed on the altar while the moon eclipses the sun and the chanting priest raises the knife is having a bad Tuesday.

This reminds me of H2G2: Space is big. Really big. I mean, you may think it's a long way down to the chemists, but that's peanuts to space.

This was, admittedly, not the sort of upbeat progress-oriented thinking Viv liked to hear during a scrum, but the honesty counted for something. She’d known too many men who blithely assumed all problems were tractable to their genius. He was the subject matter expert. She could supply the strategy, and the initiative.

So, as she had many times before, in negotiations and breakups and staff meetings and when she quickened her step to catch Susan Cho between the dinosaurs, she took the part of herself that wanted to scream, gave it a big hug like her therapist recommended, drew it a nice hot metaphorical bath, and drowned it in the bathwater. From the outside, this looked like taking a deep, slow breath.

Energy spent regretting a decision was best redirected toward addressing its consequences.

Love this. Good life motto.

Reports of my impossibility, as the prophet says, have been greatly exaggerated.

“IT COULD BE worse” was, in Viv’s experience, a phrase people tended to use when they didn’t see exactly how.

Viv tackled Xiara to save her from a flying melon; Hong dove for cover, and Gray shifted himself into cover for Hong to dive behind.

this moment should have no more meaning than any other, that the world was always changing and any claim of significance for changes in which one participated was just a failure of perspective.