The Windup Girl

by Paolo Bacigalupi

Even with the Incident four years in the past, he must perform calming rituals. When the feeling is bad, almost any object reminds him of menace.

softly. “Sex and hypocrisy. They go together like coffee and cream.”

Somewhere during her young life she lost track of how to take pleasure.

protected by the honor and uprightness of his neighbors, the desperately poor, who know that there must be limits to anything, that every squalor and debauch has limits,

A smiling girl one day is a girl with a stone bashing in the brains of a baby the next. This is the only truth. One can think there are such things as loyalty and trust and kindness but they are devil cats. In the end they are only smoke and cannot be grasped.

So many things can only be fought by waiting.

Nothing is permanent. This is the central teaching of the Buddha. Not a career, not an institution, not a wife, not a tree... All is change; change is the only truth.

A sudden eruption, and the surprise of realizing that the world he understands is not the one he actually inhabits.

Hock Seng makes himself smile in return, thinking that she does not know how little anyone cares to separate wheat from chaff, when all anyone wants to do is burn a field.

Children playing at war. Children who don’t deserve to die, but are too foolish to live.