Children of Time Quotes

“That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“A life lived entirely at the whim of another is no life at all.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“Humanity is overrated”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“If there had been some tiny bead present in the brain of all humans, that had told each other, They are like you; that had drawn some thin silk thread of empathy, person to person, in a planet-wide net – what might then have happened? Would there have been the same wars, massacres, persecutions and crusades?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“At last the words fought themselves free, 'Promise me--'
'Nothing,' she snapped instantly. 'No promises. The universe promises us nothing; I extend the same to you.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“This will be the first of a thousand worlds that we will give life to. For we are gods, and we are lonely, so we shall create.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“You can never know. That is the problem with ignorance. You can never truly know the extent of what you are ignorant about.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“Alpash moved to go, and for a moment Holsten was going to stop him, to ask that impossible question that historians can never ask, regarding the things they study: What is it like to be you? A question nobody can step far enough out of their own frame of reference to answer.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“What does it mean that you are there and we are here? Is there meaning or is it random chance? Because what else does one ask even a broken cybernetic deity but, Why are we here?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“They are performing that oldest of tricks: constructing a path by which to reach a destination, only in this case the destination is permanent security. With each step they take towards it, that security recedes. And, with each step they take, the cost of progressing towards such security grows, and the actions required to move forward become more and more extreme.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“the idea that we could necessarily recognize an alien transmission for what it was. That’s too rooted in our assumption that aliens will be in any way like us.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“that division of man against man that was the continual brake on human progress”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“There had been those back on Earth who claimed the universe cared, and that the survival of humanity was important, destined, meant . They had mostly stayed behind, holding to their corroding faith that some great power would weigh in on their behalf if only things became so very bad. Perhaps it had: those on the ark ship could never know for sure. Holsten had his own beliefs, though, and they did not encompass salvation by any means other than the hand of mankind itself.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“Sometimes all it takes, to crack a problem, is a new perspective.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“This is the future. This is where mankind takes its next great step. This is where we become gods.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“conclusions are a matter of extrapolated logic based on her best comprehension of the principles the universe has revealed to her.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“The ice had been retreating. Humanity had sprung back swiftly, expanded, fought its small wars, re-industrialized, tripping constantly over reminders of what the species had previously achieved.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“She had racked her piecemeal recollection of her species' history and found only a hierarchy of destruction: of her species devastating the fauna of planet Earth, and then turning on its own sibling offshoots, and then at last, when no other suitable adversaries remained, tearing at itself. Mankind brooks no competitors, She has explained to them — not even its own reflection.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“I’d taken up peoples’ whole lives, Mason –they’d been trying to make it work for that long. And the new generation . . . they didn’t know as much. They had learned what they could but . . . and then came another generation, devolving, understanding less than before.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“If they were of any quality or calibre, then they would ascend by their own virtues. Not if there was no structure that they could possibly climb. Not if all the structure that exists was designed to disenfranchise them. Portia,”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“There was a generation of wary caution on both sides, but once the nanovirus had taken down those barriers – between species and between individuals – so much potential tragedy was already averted. Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy – the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too – conquers all, in the end.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“He, who had translated the madness of a millennia-old guardian angel. He who had been abducted. He who had seen an alien world crawling with earthly horrors. He had feared. He had loved. He had met a man who wanted to be God. He had seen death. It had been a rough few weeks.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“Life is not perfect, individuals will always be flawed, but empathy—the sheer inability to see those around them as anything other than people too—conquers all, in the end.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“...’My children it is you. You are not what we wanted, not what we planned for but you are my experiment and you are a success,’ and that jagged edge part moves once again and she knows that some part of her, some locked away fleshy part, is trying to weep, but not from sorrow rather form pride. Only from pride.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“She may die, and her eyes look into that abyss and feed her with a terror of extinction, of un-being, that is perhaps the legacy of all life.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“division of man against man that was the continual brake on human progress.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“He could be human, in that last moment. He could exalt in his ability to destroy.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“Why should we be made thus, to improve and improve, unless it is to aspire? To”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time

“Nobody wanted to think about the limited range of fates possible for such a speck of human dust in the vast face of the cosmos.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time