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“She and I despise each other, as you know.” “Yes. Of course. You have such a capacity for loathing.” Parisa fixed him with a knowing glance. “Is there any limit to how many people you can ‘hate’?”
Lol everyone knows he is madly in love with Libby and Gideon except for him
She had always been right. The difference was that she said things correctly without a set of dimples. Or with a pair of ovaries.
she missed working with someone who could see the things she couldn’t. As it turned out, being the smartest person in the room was honestly kind of dull.
said Mort gently. The kind of gentle correction that suggested to Libby that he would very generously take her out for dinner, engage in some affectionate necking, and then saddle her with the task of raising his three obstinate children while he did Very Important Things at work.
They took pride in their students’ failures, which they interpreted to mean that their standards were high and not that they were insufficient educators.
Most natural disasters were still regarded as isolated crises, not the result of global systemic decline. The American medical system was still for-profit.
Reading this was a real one-two punch. I’m continually astounded by how The Atlas Six books, books about magic, are consistently so on the nose.
Nothing was created or destroyed without some money changing hands.
she looked at him for a brief moment before disregarding whatever thought she’d had. Probably that he looked nice or should die. Or both, which was not unheard of.
He was Paul Revere crying that the British were coming, when in fact what he meant to do was point out that the British were already here.
Money was in war—or perhaps more accurately, war was money.
The contact name was “Asshole (Derogatory)” to distinguish it from Max’s contact, which was “Asshole (Affectionate).”
Olympus was empty. The gods were already here.
Fortunately, she did not trust the archives or their brain, whatever it was. She assumed it was like programming, like code, where someone was still responsible for its biases.
It seemed that despite the fruitfulness of her studies, nature wanted increasingly for her to go outside and touch some grass.
“I can hear everything you can hear, you know,” Parisa added with pointed detachment. “And you’re right, this lawn’s a bitch.”
It suddenly seemed intensely shameful that despite all the power in the world, the only thing Reina truly wanted was to hide.
there was nothing more dismally hollowing than determining yourself to have been right all along.
He wanted, just as he had wanted at the beginning of this godforsaken year, to murder Tristan. To take him by the throat and slice him into ribbons and serve him like a roast—and also, to meticulously and with great inconvenience to himself weave a flower crown laden with unrequited meaning, with which to adorn Tristan’s incredibly stupid and perfectly functioning head.
Spring would come soon, followed by summer, followed by the inevitable smiting of all his enemies—
Tristan would rather have whatever version of Libby she had become than face the prospect of having no Libby at all.
he had seen the woman he loved for the first time in a year, and realized he would do anything for her.
First time Tristan definitively admits he loves Libby
Belen wanted Libby to make a moral choice based on Belen’s limitations but Libby had no limitations, because what she had was a fucking ex-boyfriend with a god complex and the means to bring herself home in a way that no one else on earth had ever done. When no one else alive could ever do it.
She probably looked deranged to the passing sheep.
if her life story was falling for a man who would only betray her, abduct her, and stalk her like prey until she caved under the weight of his control, then fate was nothing.
for the first time since the death of her sister, the day Libby lost half her heart—she would not presume herself to be deficient. She would not doubt the power in her body. She would not question what was earned.
Destiny was a choice. Time to torch this outcome and let the fucker burn.
optimism had not served her nearly as well as, well, rage.
Every month their press releases were full of all sorts of “groundbreaking transparency” and “calls to action” and “bright futures” for the “global community” that meant absolutely nothing besides signaling that they had money that came from somewhere.
Belen had by then come to understand that much about the world: that where there was a clean user interface and promises of groundbreaking transparency, there was probably also money. Massive and massive amounts of money.
But it wasn’t hope, Belen wanted to say, it was some bizarre sense of entitlement. The failure to believe in failure—or even to accept the nature of things and adapt—felt like an extreme form of narcissism.
Developed countries were stealing, she pointed out. They used more resources and blamed the third world for everything it lacked just because they, with their invisible-hand free markets, had afforded themselves the technology to offset their mistakes.
(Nobody could remember why the countries that had once been generously colonized by other countries somehow hadn’t evolved. Perhaps they were simply … stupid? Who could remember that far back.)
Some people still thought Belen had a point, but others began to suspect that she might have been shouting about nothing. People started asking questions like, was this perhaps reverse racism? Didn’t all lives matter? Perhaps these smaller island nations should simply embrace recycling as a way of life. Or eat less meat! The carbon footprint of meat was really something.
Go OFF Belen!!!!!!
Wasn’t it up to the individual consumer to choose to be socially conscious?
Yes yes YES!!!! This whole individual consumer centric form of “solution” is total BS! Bc that means NOTHING without systemic large scale change (without even factoring in the fact that, for the most part, ethical consumerism is both inaccessible and largely a lie)
The actionable items were intangible (no, Belen said repeatedly, actually it was very simple, all you had to do was hold corporations responsible for their emissions, but for whatever reason her voice seemed to get drowned out by something, usually heartwarming ads where oil was being cleaned off of ducks with Very Effective dish soap).
Lol calling Dawn dish soap out
were they supposed to get the money? Belen said wealth tax, and the wealthy said hm sorry what?
since most people could go about their day without feeling the effects of whatever it was Belen was mad about, lots of other issues were much sexier to them. More desirable. The whole thing was like a marriage gone stale.
her transition to childless chaos grandma, letting her hair turn gray like the proverbial village witch.
Belen suddenly became overcome with the desire to torch the whole place to the ground. The damage to the ozone would be offset by the work she had done in her twenties,
Everything was related. This was what nobody seemed to understand. That although some corn-fed family in Iowa might not feel the loss of the Philippines now, they would someday, they would have to, because ecosystems were connected, because life mattered, because nothing in this world could disappear without a trace—
A little power play, for the palate.
She had once fallen in love with a professor who was not a professor, who represented power and femininity and the promise of taking the things she deserved, who turned out to be just another white girl who thought that whatever obscure thing she was born to accomplish was worth more than Belen’s entire future.
YES!!!! Finally someone said it about Libby.
She was disappointed to discover that she did not hate him. She felt nothing for him, which was almost worse. It was … anticlimactic. Pathetic.
She was beginning to think this Ezra child’s little runaround could be much more efficiently solved with a healthy dose of preemptive strike, like killing baby Hitler.
He was so British she could spread him on a crumpet.
She had peeked behind the veil and it was just some English guy. So this was the villain? He was nothing. And she was even less than nothing after all.
“Very patronizing, thanks,” Belen replied, wondering if she shouldn’t kill him anyway just for fun.
