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21 " Everyone knew the meaning of a thing didn't emerge until there'd been an ending and you could finally see how all the parts worked together. "
― Kathryn Davis , Duplex
22 " As the sweet apple reddens on a high branch, high on the highest branch the apple pickers forgot -- no, not forgot: were unable to reach. "
23 " History is boring, Janice concurred, undaunted as usual. It’s not like the Ride of the Valkyries. It’s what comes before history that isn’t boring. "
24 " Coming to meet her love Miss Vicks had often had this sense of thwarted will, like when a large insect flies mistakenly into a room through an open window and then keeps flying around and around, attracted to all the wrong things, mirrors or framed photographs, heat registers or—sadder still—a closed window, without ever realizing that all it needs to do is go out the window it came through and it will be guaranteed a blue sky and a fresh breeze and the prospect of a life that won’t be cut short by the angry swat of a rolled newspaper. "
25 " It was a late afternoon in the month of October—the "Column of the Year" as the robots called it, the month's thick almost substantive yellow light holding the rest of the year aloft above darkness lapping at its feet. "
26 " The curly-haired girl stayed on the bench and looked out into the dark seething ocean of park just beyond the sweet yellow tide pool of the street lamp. "
27 " When the Space Drift finally took place it was like everything-everything that is and has been and always will be-became for a moment like a huge thick velvet curtain, and everything that ever considered itself to be separate from anything else no longer was but only just for that moment, the moment of the Drift, while space was carrying away time in its soft dark folds like a lover. "
28 " They never got over it. They had to harden their hearts so they wouldn't keep breaking. "
29 " She thought it was probably a good idea to like being looked at if you were a girl—it was probably key to survival. If you were a gorilla it was the other way around. Somewhere the girl had read that if you looked a gorilla in the eye it would strangle you. "
30 " I think she was in a book club for a while, but she quit when they stopped talking about the books and started talking about personal things like their feelings. "