Home > Work > Spin (Spin, #1)
21 " Words like anchors, tethering boats of memory that would otherwise be scuttled by the storm. "
― Robert Charles Wilson , Spin (Spin, #1)
22 " But physicians don’t really save lives, of course, we prolong them; "
23 " Does it make me a better person to read Cicero in the original? Cicero, for god’s sake? The Alan Dershowitz of the Roman Republic? "
24 " Don’t be upset. The world is full of surprises. We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced. "
25 " the question… as always, the question is how to look at the sun without being blinded. "
26 " You don’t understand a lie, Molly said as we paralleled an ancient boardwalk gone white with salt, until you understand the motivation behind it. "
27 " So,” I said, “does this make us water-brothers?” Wun Ngo Wen looked puzzled. Jason laughed out loud. "
28 " I made a fatuous remark about how badly people behave when they’re frightened, "
29 " And don’t you dare say you love me, because I know that’s not true. You don’t know the difference between being in love and conducting yourself like you’re in love. It’s nice you picked me, but it could have been anybody, and believe me, Tyler, it would have been just as disappointing, one way or another. "
30 " Vanished children, I can't think where I lost them... "
31 " We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced. "
32 " chipsocket "
33 " Carol’s life had been so incomplete: a verb without an object, "
34 " But he could have been lying.” “I don’t know that he ever lied, Tyler. He was just a little stingy with the truth. "
35 " But it was my first evidence that Diane lived in a world even bigger than the Big House, a world where grief and joy moved as ponderously as tides, with the weight of an ocean behind them. "
36 " The hotel balconies were mobbed. The beach was mobbed. A thousand heads and lenses swiveled in the same direction. Estimates later put the crowd in and around the Cape at nearly two million. According to police reports, more than a hundred wallets were lifted that night. There were two fatal stabbings, fifteen attempted assaults, and one premature labor. (The child, a four-pound girl, was delivered on a trestle table at the International House of Pancakes in Cocoa Beach.) "
37 " Those are things people say, Tyler. Talking about multilateralism and diplomacy is like saying ‘I love you’—it serves to facilitate the fucking. "
38 " Replicator networks,” Jason said, “are one of the things sentient civilizations tend to produce. Given the inherent difficulty of sublight-speed travel as a way of exploring the galaxy, most technological cultures eventually settle for an expanding grid of von Neumann machines—which is what the replicators are—that costs nothing to maintain and generates a trickle of scientific information that expands exponentially over historical time. "
39 " And the strange thing was that it felt absolutely familiar, the curve of her arm under my hand and the weight of her head against my shoulder: not discovered but remembered. She felt the way I had always known she would feel. Even the tang of her fear was familiar. "
40 " Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living. I had read that somewhere in my postgraduate days and remembered it as I sat at his side. Jason died as he had lived, in the heroic pursuit of understanding. His gift to the world would be the fruits of that understanding, not hoarded but freely distributed. "