“Perfection all the time would drive them mad. For every perfect little town, there s something ugly underneath. No dream without the nightmare.”
“Time is spent never bought. Minutes count when seconds blur. Memories are past that’s caught. Imaginings are future’s lure.” Cass and Silver Rainbow-”
“Slipstream – sorry, infernokrusher - takes a cut-throat razor to the hackneyed clichés of both strange and mundane genres. It cannibalises them, retrofits them, treats them the way Godzilla treats Tokyo, the Burroughs treats Interzone. Smash and grab. Cut up and fold in.”
“In Sneffels Yoculis craterem kem delibat umbra Scartaris Julii intra calendas descende, audas viator, et terrestre centrum attinges. kod feci. Arne Saknussem”
“science enables you to look things differently.”
“The best time to plan a tree was twenty years ago; the second best time is now.”
“I learned as a kid that homo sapiens would rather fight other homo sapiens than microbes. For one thing, it’s easier. And there’s something satisfying about knowing somebody else is the bad guy and seeing them laid out on the street in front of you. Something human. Microbes? The little bastards just go hide, multiply, and come back to bite you when you least expect it.”
“Since he d stepped out of medical school, all he d ever done was fulfil the same three basic templates, again and again and again. The possibility of infinite variation had led only to convergence.”
“When we decided to have Julie, I couldn’t carry her. We sat down and the hard numbers stared back at us. I made twice as much as Fern. We wouldn’t have been able to feed ourselves, let alone another mouth, if I’d been the one to hold her. And so we both went for the operation, and they took eggs from the two of us and made them one. And then I squeezed Fern’s hand when she went into the theatre, and when she came out again they’d put it inside her. And sheltered by her body, the one cell that was us divided and became two, and then three, and then four hundred million, and then they divided into parts. Lungs, heart, brain, mouth. And finally, when she was ready, Julie divided from Fern and there were three of us.”
“Your desire for vengeance will cause countless deaths, child,” she said, pointing a crooked finger at Rhylie. “Innocents will be caught up in your maelstrom, their lives torn apart. People you have never met, and will never know will die beneath your shadow if you do not stop. You tear the galaxy asunder with each step you take towards Vorcia.”
“Wait awhile, and everything will change. ~ Griblich”
“hand. I was charged with organizing the messages: descriptions of the creatures, descriptions of their space vessels, descriptions of their conveyances, of their weapons, of their movements. Positions of our soldiers, of our allies’ soldiers. Troop movements. New arrivals of space vessels. Reports of casualties. Dear God, the casualties. And their descriptions. Charred piles of ash; bloodless carcases; crumpled, broken bodies; crushed jelly; roasted, dead meat. All…in these hands.”
“Love isn t just wanting another person the way you want to own an object you see in a store. That s just desire. You want to have it around, take it home and set it up somewhere in the apartment like a lamp.”
“He’s as tense as I am, maybe even more so, but it’s so hard to reconcile that with the serenity of weightlessness. His faux-blond hair is floating out away from his head. He’s wearing a worn, much-mended, and too-large shirt his friend in town must’ve found for him to help him blend in. He looks nothing like the Romeo who dragged me off the base, nothing like the Cormac who threw himself between his own people and me. It’s like that guy’s gone, and I killed him.”
“Oh, oh. My heart starts that quivering, fluttering thing it does whenever he hints at his desire for me. Lacing his fingers through mine, he moves to close the gap between us. I know he’s only holding my hand, but it’s the manner in which his fingers curl around mine, and the way his eyes bore into me that makes it seem much more intimate.”
“Zane looks pensive, and then his lips twitch. “They say most girls end up marrying a guy just like their dad.” “Oh God … That’s so lame,” I say, spluttering as coffee dribbles down my chin. “I believe it’s a tried and tested theory,” he says, standing up and wiping my chin with the back of his hand. I jolt at his touch. “Now it’s a theory? I thought it was a saying? Next you’ll be telling me it’s a fact.” I flop back down on the couch. “Empirical evidence shows that sixty-eight percent of girls marry a guy who displays similar personality traits to her father ...” His voice trails off as I shake my head. “What?” he asks, his palms open and raised. “You really need to get out more. Where’d you glean that interesting nugget? The desperate men’s journal perhaps?”
“The way I figure it, here in New Earth, men s power has won out over women s power, just like it s done on Mainground. But men still fear women s power. No one ever forgets their mother s power to give them nourishment or withhold it. And men specially don t forget it, because they never grow into women themselves, and never lose a child s craving for the comfort of women s bodies.”