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" The President called it the “Epitome of the American dream.” Daddy called it the “unholy alliance of business and government.” But all it really was, was America giving up. Bailing out in order to join the Financial Resource Exchange. A multinational alliance focused on one thing: profit. Fund global medical care to monopolize vaccines. Back unified currency to collect planet-wide interest. And provide the resources needed for a select group of scientists and military personnel to embark on the first trip across the universe in a quest to find more natural resources—more profit. The answer to my parents’ dreams. And my worst nightmare. And I know something about nightmares, seeing as how I’ve been sleeping longer than I’ve been alive. I hope. What if this is just a part of a long dream dreamt in the short time between when Ed locked the cryo door and Hassan pushed the button to freeze me? What if? It’s a strange sort of sleep, this. Never really waking up, but becoming aware of consciousness inside a too-still body. The dreams weave in and out of memories. The only thing keeping the nightmares from engulfing me is the hope that there couldn’t possibly be a hundred more years before I wake up. Not a hundred years. Not three hundred. Not three hundred and one. Please, God, no. Sometimes it feels like a thousand years have passed; sometimes it feels as if I’ve only been sleeping a few moments. I feel most like I’m in that weird state of half-asleep, half-awake I get when I’ve tried to sleep past noon, when I know I should get up, but my mind starts wandering and I’m sure I can never get back to sleep. Even if I do slip back into a dream for a few moments, I’m mostly just awake with my eyes shut. Yeah. Cryo sleep is like that. Sometimes I think there’s something wrong. I shouldn’t be so aware. But then I realize I’m only aware for a moment, and then, as I’m realizing it, I slip into another dream. Mostly, I dream of Earth. I think that’s because I didn’t want to leave it. A field of flowers; smells of dirt and rain. A breeze ... But not really a breeze, a memory of a breeze, a memory made into a dream that tries to drown out my frozen mind. Earth. I hold on to my thoughts of Earth. I don’t like the dreamtime. The dreamtime is too much like dying. They are dreams, but I’m too out of control, I lose myself in them, and I’ve already lost too much to let them take over. I push the dream-memory down. That happened centuries ago, and it’s too late for regrets now. Because all my parents ever wanted was to be a part of the first manned interstellar exploratory mission, and all I ever wanted was to be with them. And I guess it doesn’t matter that I had a life on Earth, and that I loved Earth, and that by now, my friends have all lived and gotten old and died, and I’ve just been lying here in frozen sleep. "
― Beth Revis , Across the Universe (Across the Universe, #1)
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" Events. Events in response to other events. Think about it. Nothing since the big bang has happened without a reason. And even the big bang might have come from something, because of something. One thing makes another thing, and then that thing makes the next thing. Look at these kids. These two brothers, still kids. They don't know themselves yet. They are acting in response, in reaction, passionate reaction to something that set them off, made them commit to violence. They would not be here if the United States had not invaded Iraq in 2003. The United States would not have had fertile ground for the lie it told about Irag, weapons of mass destruction, Saddam Hussein, etc., etc., if not for Osama bin Laden and 9/11. Osama bin Laden would not have been able to recruit those men to learn how to fly planes and then crash them into buildings if not for propaganda about the persecution of the global Muslims, Afghanistan after the Russian invasion, Chechnya in the nineties, Bosnian genocides, or any instance of Islam under attack by the West, one culture trying to extinguish another. History is always a story of cause and effect. "
― , A Good Country