2
" Then Wanda proposed a health. " Health to abandoned wives!" she said. " Well now," I said. " 'Abandoned,' that's a little strong." " Pushed out, jettisoned, abjured, thrown away," she said. " I remember," I said, " a degree of mutuality, in our parting." " And when guests came," she said, " you always made me sit in the kitchen." " I thought you liked it in the kitchen," I said. " You were forever telling me to get out of the bloody kitchen." " And when my overbite required correction," she said, " you would not pay for the apparatus." " Seven years of sitting by the window with your thumb in your mouth," I said. " What did you expect?" " And when I needed a new frock," she said, " you hid the Master Charge." " There was nothing wrong with the old one," I said, " that a few well-placed patches couldn't have fixed." " And when we were invited to the Argentine Embassy," she said, " you made me drive the car in a chauffeur's cap, and park the car, and stand about with the other drivers outside while you chatted up the Ambassador." " You know no Spanish," I pointed out. " It was not the happiest of marriages," she said, " all in all." " There has been a sixty percent increase in single-person households in the last ten years, according to the Bureau of the Census," I told her. " Perhaps we are part of a trend. "
10
" ...though by then it had become increasingly difficult to distinguish the acts of God from the endeavors of men. The wind was God; of this they were confident. As were the mountains funneling the wind.
But the sand, all that monstrous, infinite sand. Who had latticed the Southwest with a network of aqueducts? Who had drained first Owens Lake then Mono Lake, Mammoth Lake, Lake Havasu and so on, leaving behind wide white smears of dust? Who had diverted the coast's rainwater and sapped the Great Basin of its groundwater? Who had tunneled beneath Lake Mead, installed a gaping outlet at its bottommost point, and drained it like a sink? Who had sucked up the Ogallala Aquifer, the Rio Grande aquifer, the snowpack of the Sierras and the Cascades? If this was God, he went by new names: Los Angeles City Council, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, City of San Diego, City of Phoenix, Arizona Water and Power, New Mexico Water Commission, Las Vegas Housing and Water Authority, Bureau of Land Management, United States Department of the Interior. "
― Claire Vaye Watkins
11
" Prediction is the business of prophets, clairvoyants, and futurologists. It is not the business of novelists. A novelist’s business is lying.
The weather bureau will tell you what next Tuesday will be like, and the Rand Corporation will tell you what the twenty-first century will be like. I don’t recommend that you turn to the writers of fiction for such information. It’s none of their business. All they’re trying to do is tell you what they’re like, and what you’re like -- what’s going on -- what the weather is now, today, this moment, the rain, the sunlight, look! Open your eyes; listen, listen. That is what the novelists say. But they don’t tell you what you will see and hear. All they can tell you is what they have seen and heard, in their time in this world, a third of it spent in sleep and dreaming another third of it spent in telling lies. [Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness] "
― Ursula K. Le Guin , The Left Hand of Darkness (Hainish Cycle, #4)
15
" Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised. Bureaus cannot live without a host, being true parasitic organisms. (A cooperative on the other hand can live without the state. That is the road to follow. The building up of independent units to meet needs of the people who participate in the functioning of the unit. A bureau operates on opposite principles of inventing needs to justify its existence.) Bureaucracy is wrong as a cancer, a turning away from the human evolutionary direction of infinite potentials and differentiation and independent spontaneous action to the complete parasitism of a virus. (It is thought that the virus is a degeneration from more complex life-form. It may at one time have been capable of independent life. Now has fallen to the borderline between living and dead matter. It can exhibit living qualities only in a host, by using the life of another — the renunciation of life itself, a falling towards inorganic, inflexible machine, towards dead matter.) Bureaus die when the structure of the state collapse. They are as helpless and unfit for independent existence as a displaced tapeworm, or a virus that has killed the host. "
― William S. Burroughs , Naked Lunch
