Spin Quotes
"The view fascinated her, and I was pleased and relieved that she was—after everything that had happened—still capable of taking such pleasure in it."
"It was a technology, in the famous quotation, 'indistinguishable from magic.'"
"No, not erased; but potentially blurred, softened, defocused."
"I guess we all have something we’re afraid to let go of."
"It was a troubling comment, one I didn’t want to think about."
"The air smelled tropical, tinged with chlorine from the hotel pool three stories down."
"She looked professional, but her hand was trembling."
"We didn’t get an official announcement about the sun until the second week of the October Event."
"People began to speak of 'a hypothetical controlling intelligence.'"
"Generosity of any kind is a rare animal, my mother used to say."
"Sometimes I say, But terrible things did happen."
"Sometimes I say, But we didn’t understand. And what could we have done about it?"
"I felt as stupidly, corporeally happy as I’d been in a long time."
"I tried not to expect more. But I couldn’t stop wanting her company."
"But what’s the purpose, what’s it supposed to achieve?"
"So how do you build a life under the threat of extinction?"
"The Earth, you have to tell them, is a few billion years old, to begin with."
"The world that looks so ruggedly normal—in spite of everything we just learned—has recently been locked up in a kind of cosmological cold storage."
"With great intellect, E.D. said, comes great responsibility."
"We can't have this talk, Tyler, if you just repeat everything back to me."
"The idea is to get enough organic action going to loosen up the carbon locked into the crust and respirate it into the atmosphere."
"An opportunity to use time for our own ends, in a way we never could before."
"If Mars is habitable, people can go there and live."
"No single thing abides, but all things flow."
"There is no sexual act so Edenic that a lonely med student can't whack off to it."
"This time next year, one hundred million years."
"I'm trying to grasp the extent of your ignorance here."
"I thought I said everything on the phone last night but can’t stop thinking about you."
"The world was fragile and I might fall through it, fall right through the floor and keep on falling forever."
"We have to play out the last minutes of the game even if the outcome is a foregone conclusion."
"We’re just days away from the first launches, which he wanted to witness without a CNN crew dunning him with boneheaded questions."
"I can’t think of a better use for it. Yes, this is a wager, and no, it’s not a sure thing."
"It was like courtroom evidence. Exhibit A, Belinda Dupree, the possibility of peace of mind."
"We all want something to reassure us about the—I’m not sure what to call it—the potency of the human race."
"But if you do succeed, the next step is to send people?"
"The survey data revealed a world still drier than the Earth but marked with lakes like polished turquoise inlaid on a copper disk."
"The big boosters were fueled on their pads, and at launch facilities and cosmodromes around the world nearly eight hundred human beings climbed gantries to lock themselves into cupboard-sized chambers and confront a destiny that was anything but certain."
"Human history is the nail on your right-hand index finger."
"It was entirely possible that Martian dynasties rose and fell while I waited for traffic lights to change."
"A half dozen survey satellites were launched that night, programmed to look for signs of human life on Mars."
"The last booster was delayed by a faulty sensor but launched ten minutes late."
"Foreigners with legal problems are terribly commonplace in Padang."
"Stick out your arms, straight out at your sides."
"I'm not engaged in some Oedipal struggle here. I know exactly what my father is and what he’s done."
"This might sound cruel, but E.D. doesn’t understand that his time has come and gone."
"The strength of the Minang is their flexibility, their deep understanding that the rest of the world is not like home and never would be."
"Even Lazarus left the grave knowing he’d die a second time."
"Life had been born on the fringe of an unstable nuclear reaction."
"No one goes home from a triple bypass or a longevity treatment expecting to live forever."
"You don’t understand a lie until you understand the motivation behind it."
"If reasonability was a knife I’d be losing blood."
"All that sweet saintliness you wear like your own suit of clothes."
"I turned and walked back to my own car, a little unsteadily, shocked less by the betrayal than by the finality of it."
"The entire contents of the Library of Alexandria being recovered by time machine could hardly have produced a greater scholarly feeding frenzy."
"The world didn’t give you what you want, and you’re not giving anything back but sympathy and aspirin."
"We’re all paranoid. We all know there are malevolent, powerful forces controlling our lives."
"The question … as always, the question is how to look at the sun without being blinded."
"The Spin had ended as quietly as it had begun, no fanfare, no noise except for a crackle of uninterpretable static from the sunny side of the planet."
"The air seemed instantly ten degrees cooler."
"The stars were spread across the sky in a meaningless sprawl."
"I can’t raise it from the dead, if that’s what you mean."
"This was technology with, literally, a life of its own. A genie out of the bottle for good and all."
"Tonight you can see all the way to the end of practically everything."
"The only question was whether it would take a day, a week, a month."
"The first positive results from the replicator project had been in for half a year when the flickers began."
"The air was already brutally hot, but at least nothing was burning."
"It wasn’t the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation."
"For if the blood of bulls and goats and the ashes of a heifer sanctifies for the purifying of the flesh, how much more shall the blood of Christ purge your conscience from dead works to serve the living God?"
"It was a wonderful expedition. I hope you spent your time as happily."
"I wish I could show you the maps we generated. Big navigable software maps. Almost two hundred thousand stars, in a halo of space hundreds of light-years in diameter."
"I thought: We lived through the day. Both of us. Diane and I. And no doubt millions more."
"We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere."
"This skin condition she’s got—It’s not contagious."
"Fall freely, Tyler. Use the enclosed documents if you need them."
"Our generation has struggled for thirty years to recover what the Spin stole from us that October night. But we can’t."
"The Hypotheticals are the von Neumann ecology. They’re one and the same."
"Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living."
"Dear God, have both my children come home to die?"
"The tide advanced and the tide ebbed, but each cycle carried away more of her resilience and more of her strength."
"I need to examine Diane. I need you to get the flashlight out of the trunk and hold it for me. Okay?"
"You want this back? Go get it." He kicked the ball into the blue-green immensity of the Indian Ocean.
"Fucking crazy American," he muttered. "I’m going to the canteen."
"This was as much me as it was Martian biotech."
"I simply had the misfortune to fall in love with her."
"The world is full of surprises. We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other."
"What would we do, now that we were no longer doomed but merely mortal?"
"It was a nuanced courtship, slow, old-fashioned."