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

“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