Sea of Silver Light Quotes

“After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“Stories are the things people use to give the universe a shape...there is little difference between a folktale, a religous revelation, and a scientific theor”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“Yes, look,” said Martine. “The Other has played his knight.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“And Jinnears—engineers! Who works with machines? Engineers and . . . and techs. Jinnears and Ticks. Renie let out a hysterical giggle. But that means I’m a Jinnear, too—I have a degree and everything. Why didn’t the Other make me a killer ghost-jellyfish as well?”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“John Wulgaru, she thought when she got back. Her hands were shaking. Is that his name, then? Am I the only person who knows that? Or the only person still alive?”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“ATTORNEY: “When you sign one of our contracts, it says very clearly on page one hundred and seventeen that all crimes that occur onsite must be immediately and accurately reported to the company.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“She floated in the midst of a living shadow. There was nothing but herself, surrounded by an unimaginable blackness. She could not think, not properly. She could only wait, while time or perhaps some incompetent impostor did its work.
The emptiness was aeons long. Even imagination died. Aeons long.
Then at last she felt something-a fluttering in the void, Oh God, it was real, it was! Something distant, but actually separate from herself. No, many somethings, small and alive, tiny blessed warm things where before there had been nothing but cold.
She reached out eagerly, but the fluttering things darted away, frightened of her. She reached again and the presences retreated even farther. Her sorrow grew so large and painful that she was certain all that kept her coherent would burst and she would spill inside out into the darkness, disperse, collapse. She lay in cold misery.
The things returned.
This time she was careful, as careful as she could be, reaching out to them slowly, gently, feeling them in their terrible fragility. After a while they came to her without coaxing. She handled them with almost infinite caution, enfolded each one as gently as she could, a century between thoughts, a millennium betweeen excruciatingly restrained movements. Even so, some proved too vulnerable, and with tiny cries they were no more, bursting in her grasp like bubbles as they gave up their essences. It tore at her heart.
The others flitted away, alarmed, and she was terrified, certain they would leave her forever. She called to them. Some came back. Oh, but they were delicate. Oh but they were beautiful.
She wept, and the universe slowly convulsed.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“Here is a fairy tale founded upon the wonders of electricity and written for children of this generation. Yet when my readers shall have become men and women my story may not seem to their children like a fairy tale at all. “Perhaps one, perhaps two—perhaps several of the Demon’s devices will be, by that time, in popular use. “Who knows?” —L. Frank Baum, The Master Key”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“NETFEED/NEWS: Poor Countries Want to Be Prisons (visual: new facility at Totness) VO: The governments of poor nations such as Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago are vying to house overflow prisoners from the United States and Europe, where prison populations are rising faster than facilities can be built, despite fierce domestic opposition in many of these small countries.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“VO: The UN High Court in the Hague has agreed to hear the case of Svetlana Stringer, a woman who claims the netshow Lifejack! had no right to select her for surveillance and create a documentary about her love life and family problems without her permission. Her attorneys argue that unless the High Court makes a stand, continual blurring of the lines of privacy by the media will mean that soon no one will have a right to any private life at all. Attorneys for the American network that makes Lifejack! insist that a waiver Ms. Stringer signed several years ago to allow herself to be filmed for another program— a documentary on music education made when she was a teenager—means she has given up her right to resist surveillance. (visual: Bling Saberstrop, attorney for ICN) SABERSTROP: “UN guidelines on privacy are just that—guidelines, not laws. We consider this to be a case where the plaintiff wants to have her cake and eat it, too—privacy only when she wants it.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“guts watery.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“VO: A UN regional court has ruled that there is nothing inherently illegal in a piece of gear that follows a user into virtual simulations and does harm to that user’s simuloid unless it violates the laws pertaining to that node. Amanda Hoek, a seventeen-year-old South African schoolgirl, has been pursued online by a piece of code created by an ex-boyfriend and, in the words of her lawyer, “systematically stalked and assaulted numerous times.” (visual: Jens Verwoerd, Hoek’s attorney) VERWOERD: “This poor girl cannot use the net— vital to her schoolwork and her social life— without her online character being followed into every node by the defendant’s avatar, a piece of code designed specifically to harass her. She has been insulted, attacked, and sexually assaulted numerous times, both verbally and through the tactors of the VR nodes, and yet this court seems to think this is nothing more than the horseplay of adolescents on the net. . . .”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“Better to risk breaking your neck than never to look up at the sky, as my father used to say.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“I don’t want to outlive her. You and your brother, Olga, God grant you long lives. Don’t take offense if I don’t stick around to see the grandchildren.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“he knew the alcohol was a bad idea, but sometimes bad ideas were the only ones you had left.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“The novelty of simply having a body has worn off. I grow weary of being scratched by branches and thorns. I will find some clothes as well.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“Azador fell down into the dirt and sobbed. Sam reached for !Xabbu’s hand and held it. She did not understand what had happened, but she knew what a broken heart looked like.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“The grown-ups went back to talking. After a while, Christabel slid out from under Mommy’s arm and went to look for something warm. She wasn’t strong enough to pull the cover off either of the beds, so she got two big towels out of the bathroom and wrapped one around Mister Sellars’ narrow shoulders. She draped the other one over the little boy, pulling it up like a blanket to just below his chin, so it looked like he really was just having a nap on her mother’s lap. “Don’t be scared,” she whispered into his ear. She patted his arm, then leaned close again. “I’m here,” she told him so quietly that even Mommy couldn’t hear her. “So please don’t be scared.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“Then, still at a great distance from my own self, I felt another set of hands upon me, clumsy, halting hands, and heard another voice. The new woman prisoner had dragged herself over to help, ignoring her own injuries. Even in the depths of my isolation I was shamed. Here was someone who had suffered what I only feared, and yet she could find the strength to worry about me, a stranger!”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“Once she had sat down every night to watch the news, but each evening’s iteration had left her feeling that she and the rest of human civilization were poorly balanced on the crest of some huge wave, that any moment the entire thing would crash down with shattering force.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“she’d downed so much coffee the night before that even after five hours of ineffective sleep she could still feel yesterday’s caffeine hustling around in her system like one of those horrible cheery people who live to organize neighborhood events.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“Paul had paused to finish his fourth cup of Darjeeling.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“he found himself overwhelmed by yet another absurdist juxtaposition—one moment about to be murdered by mutants, five minutes later waiting for water to boil for tea.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“What would you like? You are a guest. Courtesy demands I offer you something, even if you and your friends have ruined my life.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“Every injury is a gift, every gift an injury.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“A meme,” Martine said faintly. “It is a word that means a kind of . . . idea-gene. It is a theory from the last century, brought up and argued many times over. Communism was such a meme, some would say. An idea that reproduced itself over and over in human consciousness, like a biological trait. Eternal life would be another—a meme that has kept itself alive admirably, over hundreds of generations . . . as witness the Grail Brotherhood and their obsession with it.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“Still, it was better than being trampled by teddy bears.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“!Xabbu was taught by his people to absorb everything the world gives him and then, after sifting out the most important details, to act on them. But he is also clever and supremely flexible. Faced with a new world, he did not try to force it to comply with his expectations, but began all over to learn the rules, without prejudice as to where the information came from.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“The Stone Girl looked down at the ground for a long moment, then up at Renie, squinting her pockmark eyes as though against a fierce sun. “Before I met you,” she asked with a certain delicacy, “did you sort of . . . fall down? Maybe on your head?”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light

“It was like music, the kind her parents listened to, with violins and other old instruments starting almost silently then growing before you noticed it into a huge noise.”
― Tad Williams, Sea of Silver Light