“Imagine a perfect world”
“Shunting closer, I snuggle into his chest, soaking up his fresh woodsy scent. His arms encircle me and pull me close. “You always smell like home,” I whisper under my breath. Smooth, soft fingers tilt my chin upward, and I’m startled when my face meets his. Tears glisten in his eyes as he looks at me adoringly. Pressing his forehead to mine, he kisses me sweetly, his lips making brisk tantalizing sweeps across my mouth. “My heart is your home,” he whispers, his voice breathless. “It always will be.”
“– No SF novel ever won the Booker, growls a prowling clansman on his way into the SF Café. The librarian swings a shotgun from inside her longcoat, blasts the bullshit axiom from the air. Screw the Booker, she thinks. She’d rather have a hookah.”
“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.”
“Just as I thought I was beginning to know this world and understand it, it throws more magic at me.” “What’s life without magic? Turn your magic into a song, share it with others.” “You know I can’t sing.” “A story, then.”
“Leifin was obsessed by perfection and possessions. It was an obsession that prevented her from seeing any difference between carving something beautiful and killing another thinking, feeling being for its fur.”
“People could not be made to change. It had taken her a long time to learn that. People had to want to change themselves.”
“Danner strode out of her offices, the adrenaline of rage surging light and hot through her veins. Rage that soon became a kind of exhilaration. She was going to do her job. At last.”
“The air was humid, so thick with moisture that she felt it like spider-webs across her face and kept wanting to hush it away, wipe it from her skin.”
“You can help me pick out a tiara when we re done saving the world.”
“She had captured his heart and he didn t ever want it back.”
“All things change, and we change with them.”
“You re a miracle, woman. Draden meant it.”