41
" That—this—is Orion’s secret. It’s not that the ship isn’t working, that we’re never going to make it.It’s that the ship has already arrived.We’re already here! There—there—is the planet that will be our home!It floats, so bright that it hurts my eyes. Giant green landmasses spread out across blue water, with swirls and wisps of clouds twirling over top. At the edge of the planet, where it turns away from the suns and starts to darken, I can see bright flashes of light—bursts of whiteness in the darkness—and I think: Is that lightning? In the center, where the light of the suns makes the planet seem to glow from within, I can see, very distinctly, a continent. A continent. On one edge, it’s cracked and broken like an egg, dark lines snaking deep into the landmass. Rivers. Lots of them. Maybe something too big to be rivers if I can see it from here. Fingers of land stretch out into the sea, and dots of islands are just out of their grasp. That area will be cool all the time, I think. Boats can go along the rivers, up and down. We can swim in the water.Because already, I can see myself living there. Being there.On a planet that looks up at a million suns every night, and at two every day.I want to scream, shout with joy. But the air is so thin now.Too thin.I’ve spent too long looking at Orion’s secret.The boop . . . boop . . . boop . . . fades away. There’s nothing to warn about now.Because there’s no air left.My sight is rimmed with black. My head pulses with my heartbeat, which sounds as loud to me as the alarm once did. I turn from the planet—my planet—and start pulling, hand over hand, against the tether, toward the hatch. The ship bobs in and out of my vision as my whole body jerks. I’m panicked now and fighting to stay awake. I try to suck in air, but there’s nothing there to suck. I’m drowning in nothing. "
44
" An oceanic expanse of pre-dawn gray white below obscures a checkered grid of Saskatchewan, a snow plain nicked by the dark, unruly lines of woody swales. One might imagine that little is to be seen from a plane at night, but above the clouds the Milky Way is a dense, blazing arch. A full moon often lights the planet freshly, and patterns of human culture, artificially lit, are striking in ways not visible in daylight. One evening I saw the distinctive glows of cities around Delhi diffused like spiral galaxies in a continuous deck of stratus clouds far below us. In Algeria and on the Asian steppes, wind-whipped pennants of gas flared. The jungle burned in incandescent spots in Malaysia and Brazil. One clear evening at 20,000 feet over Manhattan, I could see, it seemed, every streetlight halfway to the end of Long Island. A summer lightning bolt unexpectedly revealed thousands of bright dots on the ink-black veld of the northern Transvaal: sheep. "
― Barry Lopez , About This Life
47
" When tadpole was born, I spent a sleepless night on the maternity ward gazing intently into her inky, newborn eyes, grappling to come to terms with the indisputable fact that this was an actual person looking back at me, not just a version of Mr Frog, or me, or both, in miniature. From the outset she seemed to know what she wanted, and I realised I could have no inkling of the paths she would choose to follow. But if I watch her life unfold carefully enough, perhaps I will see clear signposts pointing to who or what she will become.
Because when I look backwards, ransacking my own past for clues with the clarity that only hindsight can bring, several defining moments do stand out. Moments charged with significance; snapshots of myself which, if I were to join the dots together, lead me unswervingly to where I stand today. "
― Catherine Sanderson , Petite Anglaise
50
" What are you doing?”
Celaena lifted another piece of paper. “If His Pirateness can’t be bothered to clean for us, then I don’t see why I can’t have a look.”
“He’ll be here any second,” Sam hissed. She picked up a flattened map, examining the dots and markings along the coastline of their continent. Something small and round gleamed beneath the map, and she slipped it into her pocket before Sam could notice.
“Oh, hush,” she said, opening the hutch on the wall adjacent to the desk. “With these creaky floors, we’ll hear him a mile off.” The hutch was crammed with rolled scrolls, quills, the odd coin, and some very old, very expensive-looking brandy. She pulled out a bottle, swirling the amber liquid in the sunlight streaming through the tiny porthole window. “Care for a drink? "
― Sarah J. Maas , The Assassin's Blade (Throne of Glass, #0.1-0.5)
55
" THERE IT IS,’ my mother says, and what she means is that the dot we’ve been nearing for weeks, the one that’s been growing into a larger dot with two smaller dots circling it, has now become even larger than that, growing from a dot to a disc, shining back the light from its sun, until you can see the blue of its oceans, the green of its forests, the white of its polar caps, a circle of colour against the black beyond. "
― Patrick Ness , The New World (Chaos Walking, #0.5)
56
" God clues us in to the fact that, " As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." In short, God is not logical. This is not to say that he is illogical, only that he is not limited by logic. Simplified, " logic" is connecting the dots. We identify the dots we consider relevant, then connect them into lines and patterns. God, on the other hand, may see that, beneath one of the dots is a stack of a trillion more dots, each of which may be combined with the others. Little wonder that our ways and meanings frequently fail to match God's ways and meanings. Great wonder that, when they don't, we tend to fault him. "
