" When you’ve waited two hundred million years, you can also wait six hundred; and I waited; the way was long but I wasn’t on foot, after all; astride the galaxy I travelled through the light-years, galloping over the planetary and stellar orbits as if I were on a horse whose shoes struck sparks; I was in a state of mounting excitement; I felt I was going forth to conquer the only thing that mattered to me, sign and dominion and name . . . "
― Italo Calvino , The Complete Cosmicomics