Stephen

“Amazon is as much a complex planning mechanism based in human ingenuity as it is an inhuman place to work. Some 150 years later, we have much the same reaction of awe and terror at the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism as had Marx in the face of its Victorian antecedent.”
― Leigh Phillips, The People’s Republic of Walmart: How the World’s Biggest Corporations are Laying the Foundation for Socialism

“And yet the whole meaning of the universe, its beauty, is contained in the consciousness of intelligent life. We are the consciousness of the universe, and our job is to spread that around, to go look at things, to live everywhere we can. It’s too dangerous to keep the consciousness of the universe on only one planet, it could be wiped out.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Mars Trilogy: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars

“Wilem tapped Simmon’s shoulder. “He’s telling the truth.” Simmon glanced over at him. “Why do you say that?” “He sounds more sincere than that when he lies.”
― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

“He could describe walking towards the Taj Mahal – ho-hum, thinks the reader, immediately in the realm of the tacky postcard – and still give you a wholly fresh impression of the exact scale and actual presence of that white tomb; delicate but powerful, compact and yet boundlessly imposing. Epic grace. With those two words he encapsulated it, and you knew exactly what he meant.”
― Iain Banks, The Crow Road