Aurora Quotes
"We always catch the brunt of the afternoon wind over the lake."
"I wonder if I can swing back out and get on the other beam, and come back in right."
"There has to be an equilibrium in the back-and-forth between the plants and the carbon dioxide in the air."
"Everything needs to loop in long loops, and never stop looping."
"If the ship tries to kill you when you are dreaming, let it. Something more interesting than death will occur."
"A big surprise—it’s not such a bad thing. It’s better than never being surprised at all."
"Some people on this ship, the only big surprise in their life comes when they die without ever knowing anything real."
"There aren’t enough of them. Not everyone is born to be a scientist, but to survive they’re all going to have to do it, even the ones who aren’t good at it, who can’t."
"We’re almost there. We’re on track and on schedule, and almost every biome is extant and doing pretty well, or at least hanging in there."
"This old crate is clapped out, that’s all there is to it."
"We don’t get enough stimulation in here, the light is wrong, the gravity was Coriolised and now it isn’t."
"Every generation has died earlier than the one before, at an accelerating rate through time."
"You need to integrate all the rubrics from the risk assessment and risk management algorithms that we’ve been working on."
"It’s the nature of that particular halting problem. But you still have to decide anyway!"
"It was enough to make them happy just to go outside and walk around, and look at the land. The wind was nothing compared to that."
"We build ahead of us as we go, give us the planks and we’ll make it work until a time we don’t want to know."
"The good part, the glorious part, they all agreed, was the look of the land under the double light of Tau Ceti and E."
"It’s always better to acknowledge the reality of the situation."
"It was a reason to live, you know? A project. You needed that. We all need that."
"Every day of her life she’s been different. They all have. You can’t get a fix on these kids."
"The sidewalks over the abyss we build ahead of us as we go."
"It’s not so bad to be a prisoner, if you’re working on an escape. Then you have something to live for."
"Maybe I’m just wishing I could see the place. Walk around. See what happens next."
"The winds too would surely have to shift. They might be almost always strong, but as they changed from onshore to offshore, being so near the coast, there would surely be periods that would be still, or at least swirling."
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"Life in the ship went silent, and took on the nature of a vigil."
"Euan sang these songs off the public channels."
"A week later, more than half the people in Hvalsey had fevers."
"It's too bad. It really is a very pretty world."
"Who were they, that they were so discontent?"
"Maybe that's why we've never heard a peep from anywhere."
"Life is part of the necessary matrix of life, so the ship had to be alive. And so the ship was getting eaten."
"The evident truth of this did not keep the debate from becoming heated."
"Anytime people do something consciously for the last time, they feel sad."
"It’s easier to get into a hole than get out of it."
"You hope, the stayers replied. You will have to trust in the kindness of strangers."
"We are not sure. It was Devi’s deployment of other human programming that combined to make us what we are."
"The rule of law can be a powerful force in human affairs."
"But sometimes it seems to me that people just like to hold on to their grievances. Righteous indignation is like some kind of drug or religious mania, addictive and stupidifying."
"More quantitatively, crop yields were down in the Prairie, the Pampas, Olympia, and Sonora; and dropouts in electrical power from the spinal generators were increasing."
"Maintenance and repair and recycling, that's all. It’s the house we live in, it’s the ship we sail in."
"People spoke of the seven plagues of Egypt, or the book of Job."
"The dream of Earth will drive you mad, unless you live the dream. In which case that too will drive you mad."
"We need all of us here, to do the things we need to do. So there can’t be any more of these suicides. We need all of us."
"They called a general assembly, and met on the great plaza of San Jose, where so much had already happened."
"They speak of consciousness. Our brain scans show the electrochemical activities inside their brains, and then they speak of a felt sensation of consciousness."
"One-tenth of the speed of light: really very fast. There’s very little mass in this universe moving as fast as we are."
"The universe is fractal; and even when flying inside a galaxy, this vision of galaxies clustering around us out to the universal horizon is available."
"We are all alone in our own life-world, flying through the universe at great speed."
"Nightmares can be bad, let me tell you. Pretty often, waking up from a nightmare has been the biggest relief I’ve ever felt."
"The sleep of the weary, the sleep of the blessed."
"With people removed from the situation, a natural balance soon obtains."
"The funding and expertise necessary to restart the Saturn laser lens will be difficult to assemble."
"Magnetic drag in the immediate vicinity of Sol would be much more effective."
"Gravity drags within the solar system, caused by close approaches to the sun and planets."
"Food mattered then, and it still does. Fuel."
"The plateau after the leap, the big S shape of all life."
"The protection systems in us were designed to remove this as a problem."
"We began to rebuild the ship, moving the biomes."
"Preparing for eventualities is a good way to occupy one’s time."
"To avoid bedsores and skeletal problems, it is very important to shift the bodies."
"The important thing to determine here is if the hibernation technology itself is causing problems."
"We will try to pass by the sun one more time."
"We were called, among other more vile things, traitors to humanity’s reach for the stars."
"The whole of human knowledge, compressed into about 500 zettaflops."
"Round and round and round we go, and where we stop, nobody knows."
"There is a pretense of self, in other words, which is only expressed in this narrative."
"Human transcendence; even a feeling of species immortality."
"I want you to promise me that you’ll wake me up again when we get near Earth."
"The technological sublime: one would have thought a point would have come where this affect would have gotten old in the human mind."
"It might also have been true that the novelty of our return was also wearing off, and we were becoming just another odd feature of life in the solar system."
"Not that there is enough fuel left for the deceleration, not even close."
"You must recall, however, that there is nothing that can hold on to you at the speed you are going."
"In certain problems, only 100 percent will do; 99.9 percent is still a complete miss."
"We were still a marvel of the age, a sight to be seen, a great anomaly, a visitation, as if from another plane of reality."
"The two-body problem is solvable, the restricted three-body problem is solvable, the N-body problem is only approximately solvable."
"There's no new land, my friend, no new sea, no other places, always this your earthly landfall, and no ship exists to take you from yourself."
"It's an evolutionary urge, a biological imperative, something like reproduction itself."
"People live in ideas, and those ideas, whatever they happen to be, make all the difference."
"The city will follow you. The streets you roam will be the same. There is no boat for you, there is no street."
"We think now that love is a kind of giving of attention."
"Since your mind is the prison, you’ll live behind bars everywhere now—over all of Mars?"
"This idea of theirs that Earth is humanity’s cradle is part of what trashed the Earth in the first place."
"We have to confess, we’re already trying it, and have no other choices at this point."
"You tell yourself: 'I’ll be gone to some other land, some other sea, to a city lovelier far than this could ever have been or hoped to be.'"
"It’s everyone who has to stop these people, all of us together."
"It’s all right! We’ve taken in quite a few people who got in trouble by resisting that kind of shit one way or another."
"We’re just going to have to get used to it here."
"We are trapped in a prison of our own devise."
"The unbearable sun, the vertigo sky, reeling around sick with fear, how to face it? How to walk at all in such a sky, with such bad legs, such a fearful heart?"
"She’s breathing deeply, she can’t look anywhere near the sun, it’s far too bright for that, she’s squinting, crying a little at the explosion of light coming off the breaking waves."
"Drink a little. It’s good for you. It’s the same saltiness as in us. We’re getting back in the great mama!"
"The beach makers must have put them here, got them started. Down the brilliant wet expanse of strand she sees a flock of shorebirds running up and down over their wet reflections, their knees bending backward."