Sea of Rust (Sea of Rust, #1)

by C. Robert Cargill

Anger is nothing more than justification for bad behavior. And I have no time for bad behavior. Only survival.

We are the sum of our memories, our experience. Everything we accomplish, we do from the lessons we learned by living it. But what if you could have the memories of two lifetimes, each entirely different, having watched the same events, but with different eyes, and different thoughts, and different impressions? Well then, you’d have a much more nuanced understanding of the world. Now imagine you have ten lifetimes. Or a hundred. Or a thousand.

Hope breeds desperation and desperation is the fertile soil of mistakes.

Existing is the whole point of existence. There’s nothing else to it. No goalpost. No finish line. No final notice that tells you what purpose you really served while you were here. When you stop fighting to exist, you may as well not.

What if life isn’t merely a by-product of the universe, but its consciousness, its defense mechanism against its own mortality?

It’s an odd moment the first time you really understand someone, when all of their foibles, eccentricities, and ticks cease to be chaos, and coalesce into something wholly logical.