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The book was better than the movie. For one thing, there was a lot more in it.
Har har.
She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. “Misanthrope” is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men. And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: “misogynist.” But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.
Through the whole conversation, her mother’s need and loneliness had elicited in Ellie a wish to end the conversation, to run away. She hated herself for that.
“We call the man who drinks without a toast an alcoholic.” An early and comparatively mediocre toast had ended “To peace on all planets,”
“Every government that prepares for war paints its adversaries as monsters,” she said. “They don’t want you thinking of the other side as human. If the enemy can think and feel, you might hesitate to kill them. And killing is very important. Better to see them as monsters.”
Why should God be so clear in the Bible and so obscure in the world?”
Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive. If they are fortunate enough to find themselves in Earth orbit, most people, after a little meditation, have similar thoughts. The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling
If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn’t he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why’s he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there’s one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He’s not good at design, he’s not good at execution. He’d be out of business if there was any competition.
“This planet is run by crazy people. Remember what they have to do to get where they are.
She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
