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Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2) QUOTES

Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2) QUOTES

1 " Complex life was merely the recent froth over a great vat of prokaryotes feeding and dividing and dying. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

2 " evolution had gifted them with a profoundly complex toolkit for taking the world apart to see if there was a crab hiding under it. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

3 " Advance science as far as you like, the human mind continued to place itself at the centre of the universe. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

4 " Despite the barriers to communication, they have developed an idiolect of their own, mostly devoted to complaining. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

5 " The entire elaborate operation looked good on paper to anyone who didn’t suspect he’d gone through it solely because he wanted more space for fishtanks. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

6 " The acerbic computer helpfully attaches a legend identifying just which pieces of the wreckage are Meshner and Fabian, because she always has computing power for put-downs. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

7 " Ah well, the key failing with tigers is that their performance drops off sharply when you get them to mend coolant pipes a kilometre below the surface of the ocean. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

8 " There is an Old Earth phrase Kern used sometimes, about a boat whose every part was replaced, and was it the same boat then? "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

9 " An inclination to play God was part and parcel of wanting to go out and terraform other worlds, but good practice was to at least play nicely with the rest of the pantheon. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

10 " the mind is like an ant’s nest, individual neurons, like ant workers, weighing in on either side of any given issue until a tipping point is reached and the brain, or the colony, thinks, I have made a decision and here (post facto) are my rational reasons. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

11 " The sun filtered down through the waters like an embarrassment of sapphires "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

12 " Because in a very real way the ecosystem was the basic unit of life: species creating, by their very presence, an environment for other species to work in. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

13 " cephalopodomorphism? "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

14 " He had bred them and mutated them and played all sorts of God, and now they wanted to know why and he had no answer. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

15 " The whole audacious, ridiculous plan of his had worked out in every particular, save that he had failed to adjust for the destructive stupidity of the rest of humanity. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

16 " In her absence, after she had left, Yusuf considered that she was right, but found no acceptable way to take the words back. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

17 " There is blood in his mouth and his vision glitters with ephemeral stars. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

18 " Helena knows the research better than most: there are Portiid scientists who say that the mind is like an ant’s nest, individual neurons, like ant workers, weighing in on either side of any given issue until a tipping point is reached and the brain, or the colony, thinks, I have made a decision and here (post facto) are my rational reasons. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

19 " There is a picture emblazoned on one wall. It is desperately trying to be an illustration of a human, for a human. Possibly it is intended to be Disra Senkovi, a positive human role model acting as the bridge between two very different species. A long-gone art critic might describe the end result as Cubist, as though the creator was trying to show the man from multiple sides and at multiple times, all in one still image. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)

20 " Why are you even bothering?' He stops just passively drifting, hauls back on his arm. 'I'm a copy. I'm not me. There's no point in any of this. Get me back, the real me. What's the point in your just having me as a fake upload?' And perhaps it is not the most politic thing to say to a woman who is herself nothing more than a copy of a copy of a copy, rebuilt by spiders and filled with ants and who knows what other transformations, but she is too buys to take offence. "

― Adrian Tchaikovsky , Children of Ruin (Children of Time, #2)