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Machine (White Space, #2) QUOTES

Machine (White Space, #2) QUOTES

1 " Then, oh shit, nanotech tentacles. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

2 " The most important thing in the universe, it turns out, is a complex of subjective and individual approximations. Of tries and fails. Of ideals, and things we do to try to get close to those ideals. It's who we are when nobody is looking. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

3 " The universe was very beautiful. I looked out through the lock into the darkless night, and the hugeness of the galaxy took my breath away. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

4 " People—human-type people, my own people—are constantly on a quest for an identity. Some lucky ones find the thing they want to be already inside themselves, or in a healthy family or community. Far too many of us, however, latch onto a simplified externality that seems to offer all the answers and invest our sense of meaning in it. We make some half-baked philosophy our driving force. Something we picked up reading the sort of novels and graphic stuff where first-person narrators opine bombastically about how the galaxy really works and what makes people really tick and How You Ought To Be. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

5 " It is possible to erase and mortify yourself to the point where you actually make more work for the people around you, because they are constantly doing emotional labor to support you. A well-developed martyr complex becomes a means of getting attention without ever having to take the emotional risks of asking for attention. It’s a tendency, along with self-pity, that I use my rightminding to control. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

6 " It is possible to erase and mortify yourself to the point where you actually make more work for the people around you, because they are constantly doing emotional labor to support you. A well-developed martyr complex becomes a means of getting attention without ever having to take the emotional risks of asking for attention. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

7 " No, worse. It had never existed. I had invented it; I had allowed myself to be deluded, because I had so badly wanted it to exist. I had wanted to belong to a thing. I had wanted to need and be needed. Why are we born needing impossible things? Why is it that we all have things we need to live that simply do not exist in the universe? A purpose in life. Unconditional love? Our emotional needs met? Ha. What cruel asshole thought this shit up? "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

8 " Just as well, as it saved me having to invoke privacy, or bite. Metaphorically speaking. Biting a colleague is probably grounds for dismissal, even—especially?—in a massively multispecies, massively multicultural work environment. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

9 " So I am going to trust you. I want you to know that if it turns out you’re playing me, I’m going to spend the whole endless time the black hole is spaghettifying both of us being extremely disappointed in you. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

10 " Only exploitation under various systems all claiming to be different, but all amounting to the farming of the many to make wealthy the few. Serfdoms and indenturehood and chattel slavery. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

11 " They were also the person who kept the ox-sector Emergency Department of the largest hospital in the galaxy purring like an only slightly dyspeptic cat. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

12 " Electricity is a remarkably simple—though dangerous—animal. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

13 " You commit yourself completely to something and then you take your eyes off it for an instant and it’s gone. Like it never was. Like you can’t even see the evidence of the thing that was there, that you trusted your weight, your honor, your life, your heart to. I’ve seen some shit, let me tell you. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

14 " But as much as I was a full-time doctor now, I’d been a doctor and a cop before. One does not become either of those things due to a congenital lack of curiosity. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

15 " I wound up playing secret agent/detective/tour guide to a sexy robot. If that sounds like the sort of punishment that would be handed out in a particularly surrealist purgatory, congratulations. You’re not wrong. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

16 " Trust my insider knowledge when I tell you that the only thing more frustrating than running out of variegated peach embroidery floss halfway to Aldebaran is being the shipmate of somebody who has run out of variegated peach embroidery floss halfway to Aldebaran. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

17 " I wished I had time to throw confetti and sing songs about the contact with Linden, but when the world is ending sometimes you have to save the party until there’s time to bake. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

18 " When the world is ending sometimes you have to save the party until there's time to bake. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

19 " That I wasn’t summoned to report for administrative endoscopy was possibly the best indicator possible of how bad things were. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)

20 " The era of Terra’s history that had spawned sublight interstellar exploration and the generation ships had not been one of trust and peaceful cooperation between peoples. More one of desperate gambles and bloody-nailed survival. "

― Elizabeth Bear , Machine (White Space, #2)