The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain Quotes

“Certain things are always with us.” She counted on her fingers. “One: scarcity. Limited space and resources. Two: the need to maintain order, which, when things are scarce, is always under threat. Three: surplus. Too many people, not enough stuff: the result is extra people. What are you going to do with all these extra people? If you’re smart, you’ll turn them into a business. That’s the Hold. So there will always be a Hold. Because the Ship is a problem. And the Hold is the answer.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

“The boy had never seen either river or sea. “I don’t understand,” he said, and the prophet said sadly that he himself was as ignorant as the boy, that he possessed nothing but bones and a chain and a wish to touch the truth. This longing for awareness he called the Practice.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

“One is a River.
Everyone is a Sea.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

“One: scarcity. Limited space and resources. Two: the need to maintain order, which, when things are scarce, is always under threat. Three: surplus. Too many people, not enough stuff: the result is extra people. What are you going to do with all these extra people? If you’re smart, you’ll turn them into a business. That’s the Hold. So there will always be a Hold. Because the Ship is a problem. And the Hold is the answer.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

“And now that the awful moment had passed, or rather, was still going on, now that she was living inside the moment she had considered intolerable, she saw that she was tolerating it, lying against the wall in this fussy apartment that smelled of hand lotion and desiccated flowers. What did I think? she wondered. That time was going to end? But time went on.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

“She liked anything she could learn about toys and rhymes, the things people made and said for themselves.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

“She walked with him to his dorm and he waved her a cheerful goodbye from the steps, fulfilled, she thought, as if he had drunk deeply of the water her father had loved, immersed himself in a necessary spring, while she was crumbling, stunned, undone by the same experience, hurrying back to her apartment, hiding her tears from passersby, bumping into poles and fences. In her kitchen she stripped and stuffed her clothes in the garbage, flinging her hair clip after them.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

“And he would think: I was there. That was the Practice. He saw that his urge to draw was indeed the desire to breathe and know and live, and that this was why the prophet had sheltered his gift.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain

“Now, looking at the boy, she sank again in the weight of that long-ago evening, its dismal, colorless air, as if no time had passed, as if time would never pass, as if change itself changed nothing.”
― Sofia Samatar, The Practice, the Horizon, and the Chain