Coalescent Quotes

“Testing was never going to be fashionable, but you could hardly run a respectable software development shop with no testing effort at all.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“Arecibo to throw digital signals at the nearest stars . . .” “Pernicious?” “George, where was the debate? Were you consulted? Did you vote to have your whereabouts blasted to the universe? What right had these people to act on your behalf?”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“Daniel found all this hard to accept. He hung around, agitating for us to do something. Maybe you have to be that way when you’re young—you have to believe you can change the shitty state of the world, or else we’d all slit our wrists before reaching majority.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“Once I had a friend who had grown up in a series of military camps. They were rather bland fifties-flavor estates, dotted around the country. But they were secure, behind their barriers of wire and men with guns, and inside there were only service personnel and their families. There was no crime, no disorder, no graffiti or vandalism.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“And it was a place of madness, she thought suddenly, of a great plague of the mind: all these people drawn from across Europe to see shabby relics and to part with their wealth, all for the sake of an idea, the great rampaging mind-sickness of Christianity.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“mithraeum.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“Romulus Augustus”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“Novices were handed over between the ages of six and ten to the Pontifex Maximus, Rome’s chief priest, and were required to remain pure for thirty years.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“Although truthfully I cannot be sure if it was you or Athaulf whose restless cock impregnated me that night.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“Trajan’s Forum.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“Death comes at last and lays cold hands upon me”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“I made many foolish choices—but if I had not, I wouldn’t have you.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“You’d learn a lot more about humankind than by sticking a probe up the rectum of a farmer from Kansas.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“And Clinton zipped himself up long enough to pronounce that NASA had discovered life on Mars.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“Vespasian,”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“ludus latrunculorum”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“Maybe you’re right about the phones, though. It is an odd way to live, isn’t it, to ignore the people physically with you while contacting friends who might be hundreds of miles away? You’d think the new technology would bring us together. Instead it seems to be pushing us apart.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“PUISSANT”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“Since we know so little about the universe, religion seems a bit silly.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“The way the city somehow organized itself struck her deeply. The growth of the city, street by street, building by building, had been driven not by any conscious intent, not even by the will of the emperors, but by individual decisions, motivated by the greed or nobility, farsightedness or purblindness that afflicted every human being. And out of the millions of small decisions made every day, patterns formed and dissipated, like ripples on a turbulent stream; and somehow, out of these patterns, the soul of the city itself emerged.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“Rosa murmured, “The dome is bigger than that of Saint Peter’s in the Vatican. Did you know that? But the building was started before the birth of Christ. The Pantheon was built as a temple to all the pagan gods, but was turned into a Christian church in the seventh century, which saved it from being torn down. Now it’s the most complete of the buildings of antiquity left. Of course it has suffered even so. Once the dome was clad, inside and out, by bronze, but that was stripped away by the Barberini popes to make cannons. What the barbarians didn’t do, the Barberini did, as they say.” Lucia”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“We are safe in here, and we are bound by family ties. In fact we are so crammed in that it is only family ties that keep us from murdering each other.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent

“Honesty doesn’t excuse ignorance. But it helps.”
― Stephen Baxter, Coalescent