“Often he talked to Mr. Singer. With him he spoke of chemistry and the enigma of the universe. Of the infinitesimal sperm and the cleavage of the ripened egg. Of the complex million-fold division of cells. Of the mystery of living matter and the simplicity of death. And also he spoke with him of race.”
“I don’t know. Do men kill men, except in madness? Does any beast kill its own kind? Only the insects… There is a wish to kill in them…”
“…Lucy was tired of being manipulated and moved about like a game piece. It was time to make her own decisions. With hardly a thought of what it would mean, Lucy leapt up, hurled open the door of the coach, and threw herself onto the grass.”
“For me, all fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors—which is the logic of narratives in general—over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless.”
– Preface to The Paper Menagerie, by Ken Liu
“For any act done consciously may be defiant, may be independent, may change life utterly.
But one can only act thus if one knows there is no safety… One must wait outside. There is no hiding away from storm, waste, injustice, death. There is no stopping, only a pretense, a mean, stupid pretense of being safe and letting time and evil pass by outside. But we are all outside, Piera thought, and all defenseless. There is no safe house but death.”
– from Malafrena, by Ursula K. Le Guin
“Naples was the great European metropolis where faith in technology, in science, in economic development, in the kindness of nature, in history that leads of necessity to improvement, in democracy, was revealed, most clearly and far in advance, to be completely without foundation. To be born in that city–I went so far as to write once, thinking not of myself but of Lila’s pessimism– is useful for only one thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare of savagery and death.”
“Annie Clyde had seen more than one tree uprooted in all this foul weather. She had heard the rain every way that it fell, hard like drumming fingers, in sheets like a long sigh, in spates like pebbles tossed at the windows. When she crossed the road and went up the bank, she could see water glinting between the tree stumps. The river had already become a lake.”
–Long Man, by Amy Greene
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