Equinox Quotes

“Once the processes of manufacturing, fabrication, and assembly became tightly recursive, their evolutions accelerated from linear to exponential. When”
― Christian Cantrell, Equinox

“Of course the study was commissioned by a self-assembled panel of council members who, if their physiques were any indication, could easily be counted among the most sedentary of the entire crew. No serious objections were raised, though, since those with physically demanding occupations usually didn’t have the energy to exercise regularly anyway, and many of those with less active careers lacked the volition, positioning both parties squarely in the unfamiliar territory of consensus.”
― Christian Cantrell, Equinox

“The only way not to let the people you loved down—the people who expected you to succeed at everything you ever tried—was to simply not try at all.”
― Christian Cantrell, Equinox

“reason why most machines”
― Christian Cantrell, Equinox

“In fact, it was precisely their tendency to string together as much of the prevailing but ultimately vacuous jargon as possible—and their unquenchable propensity for lofty but nonsensical pontification—that earned City Hall the nickname of the Tower of Babel, or as Luka preferred to pronounce it, the Tower of Bullshit.”
― Christian Cantrell, Equinox

“In general, repression had been good to Luka. As he’d discovered through talking with the copy of Ellie he’d brought with him from the San Francisco, repression had enabled him to function in circumstances where others might have given up. But repression was only one tool, and Luka now knew that the structures one built were often defined—or at least profoundly influenced—by the tools one used to build them. Repression was like constantly building upward in order to avoid the work of building out a more stable foundation, but eventually the instability compounded to the point where your life had no choice but to topple. Another problem with the past was that every year, it came back around. The cycle of the Gregorian calendar was like the constant rotation of a cylinder with 365 chambers, and the longer you lived, the more rounds filled those holes. Except these bullets were never fully spent, and rather than proving lethal, the wounds they left were a gradual accumulation of debilitating injury. A much better calendrical system would have been one where days never repeated; where lives were marked with infinitely incrementing integers, constantly leaving the things everyone wanted to forget further and further behind; where every second of every day was a chance to completely reinvent oneself out of newly created time that had no inherent knowledge whatsoever of the past. In the one year since Luka and Ayla had been alone together aboard the Hawk, they had each experienced a lot of anniversaries: the days they’d left their home pod systems as children; the times each had lost people they loved; the moments they’d been forced right up to the very edge of death—in fact, well past the point of peace and acceptance—only to be unexpectedly pulled back into the worlds they thought they were finally leaving behind. And the day that was”
― Christian Cantrell, Equinox

“Sometimes the openings through which we moved forward were too small to drain all of the pain poured forth from the past, and if they could not be widened in time, the only option was to drown.”
― Christian Cantrell, Equinox

“Luka was relieved to be moving on—emotionally and physically—but he also knew that the primary problem with the past was that it never stayed where it belonged. No matter how many barriers and fortifications you erected in its path as you progressed throughout your life, it still found ways to penetrate. If you were lucky, the influence of an event decayed over time, but never by more than its half-life, and never so much that some trace of it could not still be detected. And if you were unlucky, the past accumulated at a rate faster than it was able to dissipate.”
― Christian Cantrell, Equinox

“Although the traditional concept of recycling had long since been popularized and accepted by the mainstream as basic civic responsibility, its benefits did not always hold up under close scrutiny since the amount of energy and other resources that went into the various processes—and all of the detrimental by-products that resulted—very legitimately called the entire theory into question. The reality of traditional consumer recycling was that it yielded a slender margin of benefit at best, and at worst, might have actually done a great deal of harm, representing little more than a psychological placebo designed to alleviate collective guilt over massive amounts of unfettered overconsumption, thereby accelerating the pace of global resource depletion. But once the question of energy (and”
― Christian Cantrell, Equinox