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Quotes

We drank and ate right there in the desert sun. I sniffed the sunflower. The water washed the blood from my mouth, the plantain made me forget it was ever there and the sunflower smelled beautiful. It was a better meal than the one I’d planned back in Abuja. It was all I wanted.

And in several big cities in a country far far away, the lights went out.

— Nnedi Okorafor, Noor


Conformity may give you a quiet life; it may even bring you to a University Chair. But all change in history, all advance, comes from the nonconformists.

— A.J.P. Taylor, The Trouble Makers


Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.

— Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit


And so my fantasy becomes reality,
And I must be what I must be and face tomorrow.

— Simon & Garfunkel, Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall


First you get the test, and then afterwards you spend years finding out how you passed it. It’s a bit like life in that respect.

— Terry Pratchett, The Wee Free Men


I know this comes as a shock to you, but not everyone is a neophiliac posthuman bodysurfer whose idea of a sabbatical is to spend twenty years as a flock of tightly networked seagulls in order to try to prove the Turing Oracle thesis

— Charles Stross, Accelerando


One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Zarathustra’s Prologue


Handsome princes and true love meant nothing to me on the journey I had undertaken, but they were believed in by all about me.

— Karl Schroeder, Ventus


Of what a strange nature is knowledge! It clings to the mind, when it has once seized on it, like a lichen on the rock.

— Mary Shelley, Frankenstein