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Borders had stopped mattering after the asteroid Finis was discovered twenty years ago. Everyone was just an Earthling now.
Why take a shower when you’re just going to get dirty? Why eat when you’re just going to get hungry? Every flower dies eventually, Sam. But not yet.
So maybe he had been apologizing for giving her life in the first place, when he knew it would be full of dread. She wished she could have told him that life was already full of dread, no matter who you were. That there was nothing you could have that you couldn’t one day lose. That autumn always gave way to winter, but it was her favorite time of year—those fleeting bursts of beauty before the branches went bare.
“Well, you can’t love everything equally,” she said. “You just can’t—and if you did, then it’s the same as loving nothing at all. So you have to hold just a few things dear, because that’s what love is. Particular. Specific.”
“You have to hold just a few things dear, because that’s what love is. Particular. Specific.”
“An orchid is not self-reliant,” he said. “It doesn’t carry endosperm in its seeds, so it requires a symbiotic relationship with a fungus in order to survive. But it finds those relationships everywhere. On almost every continent, in almost every climate. On trees, on rocks, even underground. A temperamental plant, but somehow, in contradiction to that, a resilient one.”
“You feel like you’ve been dying all this time, too, then,” Samantha said. “It’s just that your body hasn’t caught on yet.”
it was simply that her entire life had been lived in anticipation of loss, such that neither her mother’s death nor her father’s had surprised her in the least, but had rather seemed like the fulfillment of a promise.
“It’s the story of this planet in reverse,” she said. “We were born out of—coalescing matter, chaos, here, all lava and earthquakes and thunder.” She smiled a little. “It will be like . . . seeing the birth of the world. Can you imagine anything more beautiful, more worth witnessing, than that?”
But now she felt like he had known too well that he was in a piece of weaving that was unraveling, that the world was unmaking itself, and he just didn’t want to witness it.
