Aditya

“He had had many conversations during his long life. Some were fascinating and stayed with him more than a century later. Others were less so. As a younger man he had tolerated those as part of the cost of doing business—a sort of tax that all people must pay in order to take part in civilized society. When he had turned one hundred, he had decided to stop paying that tax. Henceforth he would engage only in conversations that really interested him—which, with a few exceptions for close friends and family members, meant conversations with a purpose.”
― Neal Stephenson, Seveneves

“When we say that “the world has ended,” remember – it is usually a lie. The planet is just fine.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Stone Sky

“It was not that Abbenay was short of power, not with her wind turbines and the earth temperature-differential generators used for heating; but the principle of organic economy was too essential to the functioning of the society not to affect ethics and aesthetics profoundly. “Excess is excrement,” Odo wrote in the Analogy. “Excrement retained in the body is a poison.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

“After seven centuries of existence and at least four centuries where few citizens existed without it, the datasphere – including the All Thing and all comm and access bands – simply ceased to be. Hundreds of thousands of citizens went insane at that moment – shocked into catatonia by the disappearance of senses which had become more important to them than sight or hearing. More hundreds of thousands of datumplane operators, including many of the so-called cyberpukes and system cowboys, were lost, their analog personas caught in the crash of the datasphere or their brains burned out by neural-shunt overload or an effect later known as zero-zero feedback.”
― Dan Simmons, The Fall of Hyperion