Melissa E.

“What you say, when you say a word. What you think when you say it. What I see and hear when you speak. Words are ancient; visions and echoes cling to them like barnacles on the whale’s back. You speak words used in poetry and song since the beginning of the world we know. Here, you will learn to hear and to speak as if you had never listened, never spoken before. Then you will learn the thousand meanings within the word. What you say when you say fire.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Song for the Basilisk

“He had made tiny pipes of feathers he had found along the streets; birds answered him here as they had in the hinterlands. A night-bird, singing back to his playing, showed him the loose bar in the iron fence, the furrowed earth along which the bar swung sideways, that told him, as the bird did, that others came here secretly. Around him, the sleeping city dreamed, tossed fretfully, muttered, dreamed again.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Song for the Basilisk

“she was, like the paintings and marble pillars, a background detail in the house of the Basilisk. Only her bowing, the unexpected, enthusiastic shrieks she got out of the peasant’s instrument, made her incongruous, and therefore real.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Song for the Basilisk

“I'll tell you the problem with engineers and scientists. Scientists have an elaborate line of bullshit about how they are seeking to know the truth about nature. Which is true, but that's not what drives them. Nobody is driven by abstractions like 'seeking truth.'

Scientists are actually preoccupied with accomplishment. So they are focused on whether they can do something. They never stop to ask if they should do something. They conveniently define such considerations as pointless. If they don't do it, someone else will. Discovery, they believe, is inevitable. So they just try to do it first. That's the game in science. Even pure scientific discovery is an aggressive, penetrative act. It takes big equipment, and it literally changes the world afterward. Particle accelerators scar the land, and leave radioactive byproducts. Astronauts leave trash on the moon. There is always some proof that scientists were there, making their discoveries. Discovery is always a rape of the natural world. Always.

The scientists want it that way. They have to stick their instruments in. They have to leave their mark. They can't just watch. They can't just appreciate. They can't just fit into the natural order. They have to make something unnatural happen. That is the scientist's job, and now we have whole societies that try to be scientific."

- Ian Malcolm”
― Michael Crichton