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61 " Grandfather, Omeir thinks, already I have seen things I did not know how to dream. "
― Anthony Doerr , Cloud Cuckoo Land
62 " Konstance is old enough to understand that Father’s farm is unlike the other three: those spaces are tidy and systematic, while Farm 4 is a tangle of wires and sensors, grow-racks skewed at every angle, individual trays crowded with different species, creeping thyme beside radishes beside carrots. Long white hairs sprout from Father’s ears; he’s at least two decades older than the other children’s fathers; he’s always growing inedible flowers just to see what they look like and muttering in his funny accent about compost tea. He claims he can taste whether a lettuce has lived a happy life; he says one sniff of a properly grown chickpea can whisk him three zillion kilometers back to the fields who grew up in Scheria. "
63 " Some swivel in Seymour has locked: he can no longer see the planet as anything but dying, and everyone around him complicit in the killing. The people in the Eden’s Gate houses fill their trash cans and pilot SUVs between their two homes and play music on Bluetooth speakers in their backyards and tell themselves they’re good people, conducting honorable, decent lives, living the so-called dream—as though America were an Eden where God’s warm benevolence fell equally across every soul. When in truth they’re participating in a pyramid scheme that’s chewing up everybody at the bottom, people like his mother. And they’re all congratulating themselves for it. MATHILDA: "
64 " Sometimes,” he says, “when I feel like working, I just sit and wait for the feeling to pass, "
65 " Why can’t healing happen as quickly as wounding? You twist an ankle, break a bone- you can be hurt in a heartbeat. Hour by hour, week by week, year by year, the cells in your body labor to remake themselves the way they were the instant before your injury. But even then you’re never the same: not quite. "
66 " You and I will never reach Beta Oph2, dear, and that is a painful truth. But in time you will come to believe that there is nobility in being a part of an enterprise that will outlast you. "
67 " Each sign signifies a sound, and to link sounds is to form words, and to link words is to construct worlds. "
68 " and you assume it will be similar enough to the previous one—that you will be safe, that your family will be alive, that you will be together, that life will remain mostly as it was. Then a moment arrives and everything changes. "
69 " There are many people in this world,” Himerius says, “who do not care to what purposes their engines are put. So long as they are paid. "
70 " On Earth, when I was a boy, most everybody got sick. Rashes, funny little fevers. All the unmodified people got sick every now and then. It's part of being human. "
71 " The people in the Eden’s Gate houses fill their trash cans and pilot SUVs between their two homes and play music on Bluetooth speakers in their backyards and tell themselves they’re good people, conducting honorable, decent lives, living the so-called dream—as though America were an Eden where God’s warm benevolence fell equally across every soul. When in truth they’re participating in a pyramid scheme that’s chewing up everybody at the bottom, people like his mother. And they’re all congratulating themselves for it. "
72 " Stranger, whoever you are, open this to learn what will amaze you. "
73 " Thermal scanners? Laser sights? Above the junipers, a trio of blue lights hover: some kind of remote-controlled drone. These, the creatures we have chosen to repopulate the earth. "
74 " You are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth itself to nobody! "
75 " Three a lucky number, Chryse always said: Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Birth, life, death. Past, present, future. "
76 " Styrofoam tombstones around the stage and angles the microwave-box-turned-sarcophagus so the audience can read its epitaph: Aethon: Lived 80 Years a Man, 1 "
77 " Anna imagines Antonius Diogenes, whoever he was, setting knife to quill, quill to ink, ink to scroll, placing one more barricade in front of Aethon, stretching time for another purpose: to detain his niece in the living world for a little longer. "
78 " Owls have three eyelids. Their eyeballs are not spheres but elongated tubes. A group of owls is called a parliament. "
79 " As winter comes on, Master Kalaphates sees portents in every shadow. A pitcher cracks, a bucket leaks, a flame goes out: the new sultan is to blame. Kalaphates complains that orders have stopped arriving from the provinces; the needleworkers do not work hard enough, or they have used too much gold thread, or they have not used enough, or their faith is impure. Agata is too slow, Thekla is too old, Elyse’s designs are too dull. A single fruit fly in his wine can send a black thread twisting through his mood that lingers for days. "
80 " The hallowed Hodegetria has failed; the Mother of God has forsaken them; the beast of the apocalypse rises from the sea. The Antichrist scratches at the gate. Time is a circle, Licinius used to say, and every circle eventually must close. "