nathan’s Reviews > Absolution > Status Update

There was comfort in the thought, how if only he could make it across, nothing would change.

..he became a kind of vessel, but also a candle and a flame.

He only said part of that aloud and then defaulted to his own history. Maybe out of guilt. Maybe because he liked sharing it without really sharing it. Maybe because he wanted it out of his soul.

“We all kill what we love and love what we kill,” he said. “We all kill what we despise and want to shut up,” Peng said.

Extra drone: “The natural state of men living side by side is war. The natural process of peace is to side with war. This expedition goes in peace, but with the capacity to wage war.” Did it?

To sleep, to dream, to rise again, someday. And what day would that be, and did it matter?

He could see that now as the dust that wasn’t dust overtook him. The dust was just another kind of language, and perhaps the biggest mistake he’d made was not believing the biologists’ accounts in a literal way.
…
the past could ever defeat the future.

Because that was the distant future, not the past, and the future was where the Rogue came from, a future unbearably uncertain, a place where everything was fluid because of what was coming, and if he had no place here, if he had no way to come to rest, the Tyrant told him, he might once he crossed that divide.

The Rogue’s left eye opened. That cryptic eye, that alien regard. Staring at an organism become other than a man, but sheltering in a man’s body. What was this new thing that looked so old?

There was a way in which it was so real and immediate and yet also felt impossible and drawn out. Maybe he could not contain the feverish intensity of it and also the overwhelming beauty of it, how he could be reduced down to his bones by fear and yet also feel so alive.