When a spider comes down from the sky, it means someone is going to die.
. Kenn Harper – In Those Days
It’s one thing to practice sword moves on a straw dummy named Joe in your office on a sunny afternoon, and quite another warding off a Wraith in the middle of a haunted wood.
. Jonathan Stroud – The Whispering Skull
To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive.
. Robert Louis Stevenson (quoted in Echopraxia)
Fifty thousand years ago there were these three guys spread out across the plain, and they each heard something rustling in the grass. The first one thought it was a tiger, and he ran like hell, and it was a tiger but the guy got away. The second one thought the rustling was a tiger, and he ran like hell, but it was only the wind and his friends all laughed at him for being such a chickenshit. But the third guy, he thought it was only the wind, so he shrugged it off and a tiger had him for dinner. And the same thing happened a million times across ten thousand generations – and after awhile everyone was seeing tigers in the grass even when there weren’t any tigers, because even chickenshits have more kids than corpses do.
. Peter Watts – Echopraxia
Natural selection favors the paranoid.
. Peter Watts – Echopraxia
Soulmates … are two people who have loved each other in another dimension.
. Ingrid Jonach – When the World Was Flat (and we were in love)
Satisfaction with material purchases decreases over time, while satisfaction with experiences increases.
. Wallace J. Nichols – Blue Mind
We listen to music, watch TV, surf the Internet, read books; eat prepared meals that taste nothing like their original natural ingredients; use perfumes and soaps and household products that mask real smells; and touch screens and plastic and processed materials that feel like nothing in nature. None of this is bad per se, but we have been separated from the very stimuli we were built over hundreds and hundreds of thousands of years to perceive: the richness of the natural world.
. Wallace J. Nichols – Blue Mind
I loved her in my way, but she wanted to be loved in hers.
. Bertolt Brecht
A small tragedy, she thought, to have that face and never smile.
. Kameron Hurley – The Mirror Empire