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A childless middle-aged man is probably the last person who should write a book in which every

A childless middle-aged man is probably the last person who should write a book in which every character is pregnant, but I had the help of a crew who coached, consulted and guided me; shared their birth stories; and did their best to keep me on the right path{...}
—Acknowledgements, p.480

"It is a fair tale, though it is sad, as are all the tales of Middle-earth, and yet it may lift up your hearts."
—Strider, of the tale of Tinúviel, p.191

"Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of his malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it, that having the Ring we may seek to destroy it."
—Gandalf, p.269

"Many that live deserve death. And many that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be so eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."
—p.59, p.615

Much the same sort of talk can still be heard among the orc-minded; dreary and repetitive with hatred and contempt, too long removed from good to retain even verbal vigour, save in the ears of those to whom only the squalid sounds strong.
—p.1134, Appendix F

She doesn't even know where cars go to get serviced these days; they just send you a text to tell you that they're doing it and disappear for a few hours.
—p.97

Ever since Trump promised his wall, it's been obvious that what the white supremacists really want is their own reality. Now they can finally have it. K.C. describes their America game, in which the South won the war and everything now has the misty, color-saturated quality of Gone with the Wind. The men are all gentlemen—and white—and the women wear skirts with flounces when they wear anything at all.
There are no other countries, there is no "rest of the world." There are no other religions than the one where a blond, blue-eyed Christ gazes benevolently down upon his people. But there are always traitors, and the congenitally inferior to ferret out and destroy.
—p.138

"Remember Wikipedia, a free online repository of human knowledge created entirely by volunteer effort? It was built by men and women who, in all other ways, had become entirely economically self-interested. They were right in the heart of the fallen world, and yet they gave freely. They built it for free because it was a form of play—and because they couldn't imagine any way they could get paid to do it. Think about it: they thought they couldn't make money doing it, so they did it.
—p.179, emphases in original

Science tangible but no different from magic now, because we cannot replicate it, which we were taught is the point of science: research, which is to say, you can find it again.
—p.7

You could not buy a new world into existence. And at last, the lights went out for good.
—p.54

"Pissing people off is kind of my superpower."
—Zara, p.148

The Revolutionary is on stage, on fire, preaching to the c

The Revolutionary is on stage, on fire, preaching to the crowd about the happy days ahead:
"Come the Revolution, everyone will have strawberries and cream!"

A little guy up front, possibly trapped there by the press of other bodies, unexpectedly raises his hand:
"But—but I don't like strawberries and cream."

The Revolutionary stops mid-speech. He glares and points at the man who had dared to interrupt him, and thunders,
"Come the Revolution, everyone will have strawberries and cream—and like them!"

Let me say this before rain becomes a utility that they can plan and distribute for money. By "they" I mean the people who cannot understand that rain is a festival, who do not appreciate its gratuity, who think that what has no price has no value, that what cannot be sold is not real, so that the only way to make something actual is to place it on the market. The time will come when they will sell you even your rain. At the moment it is still free, and I am in it. I celebrate its gratuity and its meaninglessness.
—p.5, from Thomas Merton, "Rain and the Rhinoceros" (1965)

We convince ourselves we don't like cats at all.
They, more than the dogs, are too openly sensuous. Do you know what they overtly do when they come and sit on your stomach at night? Do you know the rhythm they have, how with their paws they innocently knead your stomach and dare purr at the same time and rub themselves, their whole selves, against you, indecently as love and sensuality itself...
Yes, should we give in to one, should we dare give into one, and love just one little animal, we should be undone for every dog and cat approaching us, we should be utterly undone for every human being approaching us...
—pp.135-136, from Kay Johnson's essay "Proximity" (1961)

It may be contended that the Marxist objective is not essentially different in constitution; but at this point a yawning chasm opens out before us which can only be bridged by that special form of Marxist utopics, a chasm between, on the one side, the transformation to be consummated sometime in the future—no one knows how long after the final victory of the Revolution—and, on the other, the road to the Revolution and beyond it, which road is characterized by a far-reaching centralization that permits no individual features and no individual initiative. Uniformity as a means is to change miraculously into multiplicity as an end; compulsion into freedom. As against this the "utopian" or non-Marxist socialist desires a means commensurate with his ends; he refuses to believe that in our reliance on the future "leap" we have to do now the direct opposite of what we are striving for; he believes rather that we must create here and now the space now possible for the thing for which we are striving, so that it may come to fulfilment then; he does not believe in the post-revolutionary leap, but he does believe in revolutionary continuity. To put it more precisely: he believes in a continuity within which revolution is only the accomplishment, the setting free and extension of a reality that has already grown to its true possibilities.
—p.199, from Martin Buber, "The Organic Commonwealth" (1949)

Wherever we live or whatever we spend in this country has been stolen, is not truly ours, and if that is the case how can any individual life be whole and pure—or free? There are few black faces at the festivals or in the mountains, and the connections between whites and blacks, or private lives and the public good, are still too tangled in my mind for me to make clear. Those words scrawled on the wall behind me�truth, purity, nonviolence, poverty, nonpossession—are noble goals, but though there are many among the young willing to pursue them, many, despite their clothes and hair, do not—and those seem to be eccentric versions of their parents. Only a blind man or a fool would be untroubled by that, and I have no hope or illusion of cleaning it up here, it is simply that one cannot let it go unsaid...
—p.306, from Peter Marin, "The Free People" (1969)

There is no government so worthy as your son who fishes with you in silence beside the forest pool.
There is no national glory so comely as your daughter whose hands have learned a music and go their own way on the keys.
There is no national glory so comely as my daughter who dances and sings and is the brightness of my house.
There is no government so worthy as my son who laughs, as he comes up the path from the river in the evening, for joy.
—p.315, from Wendell Berry, "To a Siberian Woodsman" (1968)

Our bad magicians are the technical elites and those who employ them to intimidate by way of expertise. The artificiality of the industrial environment strengthens their hand against us. For how can we now do without them?
—p.420, from Theodore Roszak's introduction to Section V., "Transcendence"

When I was young I could breathe underwater.
—p.13

No human being knew what life on Earth really looked like. How could they? They lived on the land, in the marginal kingdom of aberrant outliers. All the forests and savannas and wetlands and deserts and grasslands on all the continents were just afterthoughts, ancillaries to the Earth's main stage.
—p.117

Memory should be vise-like in youth when the emerging navigator needed it most. But no one ever survived into old age who couldn't open that vise and let much of their hard-gripped facts go free. Evelyne simply hoped that the girl might live long enough to grow as forgetful as she needed to be.
—p.123

Of all the things we humans excel at, moving the goalposts may be our best trick. The moment advanced AIs get good at that, they'll have passed the real Turing test.
—p.155

"First: My father is a patriot who is going to finish out his days as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy. He was away on ships for most of my childhood. He has one shriveled hand and one gold-edged tooth, and a brilliant, trusting smile, and he puts on one of his several uniforms every day and goes to work helping to bring stability to a volatile world. He likes beer a bit too much, and Dave Brubeck, in small doses. He worships, worships, worships me, but I scare the shit out of him because he knows I don't believe in his world, and he'll never understand mine."
—p.223

"What does it mean to be a 'Pacific Islander'? I haven't a clue. I dress and think and behave like an outsider. I speak the languages of the Western invaders. The planet that I came from is gone forever. And I don't belong in the one where I've landed. The only way I can find out about where I came from—who my people were—is to read about it in books."
—p.225

Manutahi Roa, Makatea's energy czar and all-around tech point person, moved the electronics for the event into the community center while everyone was in church. He called himself a Democratic Communist, with adamant but respectful disdain for the opiate of the masses. That atheism freed up his Sunday mornings and added four more hours to his usable time, leaving him, by his own estimates, almost nine percent more productive every week than if he had been saddled with belief.
—p.283

They say that comedy is trauma plus time. But I have never needed time.
—p.225

You may well laugh at the absurdity of wanting to be a dog, but I have grown up to become an incredibly successful one. I am a very trusting adult with devastatingly simple needs. I like being told I am good, I'm distressed by loud noises, I always feel much better after a walk, and I am very easily bribed with the promise of food.
—p.37

Surely a man would want to know if he was stupid, so he could self-correct. That's how I liked to do the living.
—p.108

In 2014, making fun of hipsters had become something of a comedy hack subject, though to be fair, I'd been hostile to the "hipster aesthetic" long before it was cool, but I don't like to brag about it because that is such a hipster thing to say.
—p.239

Most pervasively, autism is known as a side effect of a disease called Andrew Wakefield—the quack who falsely linked autism with vaccinations after he ate an activated walnut and became a Leprechaun.
—p.265

Welfare systems are not built to be easy for people who are anxious about using the phone, or people who mix up dates. They are not designed for people who are bad at keeping time, filling out forms, or people who can't easily access all the relevant bank, residential and employment details from the past five years, if they thought to keep that information at all. Welfare systems don't accommodate for transience because welfare systems aren't built to be accessible, they are built to be temples of administrative doom, because, apparently, welfare is a treasure that must be protected. Can somebody please do something about that?
—p.274

You know why I make fun of straight white men? Because they are such good sports, they get it! Good joke about me. Refreshing perspective!
�(Nanette: Adelaide edit), p.353

She'd come to every class with a false smile plastered on her face and fantasies of smacking each of them upside the head with a copy of Infinite Jest—the hardcover, of course. This semester, she had a class full of creative writing PhD students who'd all convinced themselves and one another that the best type of storytelling was plotless, self-indulgent, and full of whiny characters who lived mostly in their minds.
—p.11

"We are mortal beings. We die. But we live first."
—p.253

"You are a very annoying child."
—p.399

A reliable device built to last a lifetime, as all computers were.
—p.30

Like a beautiful symbiote, the language, verve, glitter-bomb swagger and shoot-from-the-hip-with-one-of-those-prop-guns-that-unfurls-and-says-BANG-on-it of Space Oddity has just become a part of me.

Yes, yes, of course Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes saved the world.
But what have they done for us lately?
—p.7

And the forces of stupid are bound and determined to unbalance that immortal equation forever, if they can possibly manage it. That is their highest goal. No more beauty. All stupid all the time, as far as the eye can see.
—p.37

Humanity was, as it turned out, painfully, embarrassingly, harrowingly average.
—p.12

Depending on preparation, ghemui truly is both an effective floor cleaner and an exquisite dessert topping, as well as forming the base matrix for the Utorax Formations primary weapons technology, and overall just looks quite nice in an engagement ring.
—p.42, which I cannot but think is . Note also, if you will, the clever callback to Saturday Night Live's classic commercial parody (for which I was, sadly, unable to find a working link).

Formal charges against modern English filed by the Publishing Hiveknot of the Pisces Epsilon Voidspace include: theft, larceny, grand theft comma, identity theft, public indecency, still more theft, slang assault, semicolon abuse, fugitive sentences running on forever to escape the law, vandalism, drunk and disorderly conduct, general nuisance, and driving under the influence of French.
—p.93

It's not that humanity invented becoming so overwhelmed by the powerful cuteness of a particularly fluffy being that one is compelled by a drive stronger than survival, sex, loyalty, or the accumulation of resources to stroke its head and ask who is a good girl in a totally altered speaking voice over and over until both the petter and the pettee crumble to dust, leaving only a fossilized leash and wallet resting on a pile of dusty cold bones.
That dubious behavior is so universal that can I pet your dog? is statistically the most commonly uttered phrase in all languages, in the history of the galaxy (allowing for variations on the exact meaning of the word "dog"){...}
—p.192

But he'd never wanted to visit Minneapolis, or St. Paul, or their collective international airport, either. In fact, he didn't believe he'd given the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport one lonely friendless thought in all his days.
So why was it here?
—p±è.199-200

And while the detailing personality types as Good, Evil and Neutral as well as Lawful, Neutral, and Chaotic makes a nice little , if that's what gets your motor running, it leaves out the Lazy axis. It's all well and good to be bright-eyed, serpentine-tailed Lawful Good, but Lawful has rarely survived Lazy in the history of jurisprudence, and Good never has.
—p.291

(view spoiler)["Don't you see, Mira? This is it. For me, this is it. What a silly biscuit I am. I could have been hugging you all along. There's only one way I could touch you and feel nothing. Right here and right now is the very best Decibel Jones can possibly get. This is my best result, my most perfect timeline. It actually, completely, once and for all, doesn't get better than this."
"Mushy, mushy, Dess."
"Mushy, mushy, Wonderful."
(hide spoiler)]
—p±è.350-351

"How'm I gonna be an optimist about this?"
—from "," by the band Bastille

{...}loving advice wrapped in f-bombs wrapped in deep cynicism that is always a mask for a soul that longs to be an optimist, and is always looking for an excuse to try out hope.
—p.377

At certain points I've referred to myself using my previous name and pronouns. This is a choice that felt right to me, occasionally, when talking about my past self, but it's not an invitation for anyone {else} to do the same.
—p.³æ

Stepping up is not just for the individual, and I am able to be out because of countless other people, ones who did not have access to what I have, who won't end up on magazine covers.
—p.200

When you are broken, you run. But you don't always run away. Sometime

When you are broken, you run. But you don't always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards.
—p.46

{...}I have no idea what amazement is still to come. Because Mabel and I are about to witness an extraordinary phenomenon, an evening ritual I had no idea existed until today. Joggers! Like bats leaving their roost, their numbers build incrementally. First there are one or two, then a gap, then another one, and then three together. By the time Mabel and I are halfway home it feels as if we're in a nature documentary about the Serengeti. They are everywhere. Herds of them.
—p.118

The anger was vast and it came out of nowhere. It was the rage of something not fitting: the frustration of trying to put something in a box that is slightly too small. You try moving the shape around in the hope that some angle will make it fit in the box. Slowly comes an apprehension that this might not, after all, be possible. And finally you know it won't fit, know there is no way it can fit, but this doesn't stop you using brute force to try to crush it in, punishing the bloody thing for not fitting properly. That was what it was like, but I was the box, I was the thing that didn't fit, and I was the person smashing it, over and over again, with bruised and bleeding hands.
—p.141

He is only a man. Success is a pressure. He cannot quite bear it. It boils and bubbles. And without knowing it, quietly and cruelly, he begins to sabotage his success, because success cannot be borne. It is so very easily done.
—p.147

It struck me then that perhaps the bareness and wrongness of the world was an illusion; that things might still be real, and right, and beautiful, even if I could not see them—that if I stood in the right place, and was lucky, this might somehow be revealed to me.
—p.151

The suffering of his body is as naught to the joy of being free from the pain of being seen.
—p.194

It was always there, kneeling by Mabel on her prey, that the thoughts came, when I wondered how I could be doing this, how I could be hunting at all. I hate killing things. I'm loath to tread on spiders and get laughed at for rescuing flies. But now I understood for the first time what bloodthirstiness was all about. It was only when I was aligned with the hawk's eye that it made sense, but then it made more sense than anything else in the world.
—p.195

Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.
—p.265

The time-travel project was the first time in history that any person had been brought out of their time and into their far future. In this sense, the predicament of the expats was unique. But the rhythms of loss and asylum, exodus and loneliness, roll like floods across human history. I'd seen it happen around my own life.
—p.271

Adela shrugged. "We have time travel," she said, like someone describing the coffee machine. "Welcome to the Ministry."
—p.4

"{...}Accepting as I do that you're unlikely to tell me what the fuck is going on: What the fuck is going on?"
—p.98

The great project of empire was to categorize: owned and owner, colonizer and colonized, é±¹´Ç±ô³Üé and barbarian, mine and yours. I inherited those taxonomies. This, I think, was the reason I played fuck-about-Fred with my ethnic identity as much as I could. "They" are still in charge and even when "they" are saying marginalized instead of mongoloid they are still acknowledging that we are an issue to be dealt with. When would it be my turn to hold the carrot and stick?
—p±è.176

It is nowhere you chose to be, and yet here you are. Papa steers your shoulders into the heart of the jack drive.
‱÷°ù´Ç±ô´Ç²µ³Ü±ð

Nobody who didn't live through it can ever understand it.
—Harp Oletsky, p.22

Congressmen train themselves to think in election cycles, not planetary ones. They see spiking market highs and lows, and forget how to read in circles.
—p.8

Why should money make evil comprehensible to anyone? But it does precisely that. Greed, violence, cruelty—money can explain them. Money can make the most heinous act seem like a sane one. A business decision, a necessary calculation. Evil's genius is to costume itself as sense. The "reasonable choice."
—p.58

God invented a thousand clocks, and winter wheat is one of the most beautiful.
—p.77

A seed is a funny little casket. Bury it, and something springs to life.
—p.95

Names are the spells of protection mothers cast on their children, and I needed to know who I was swaddling.
—p.219

Q: What is the evil this world runs on?
A: Better you than me.
—p.222

I grew up in Omaha, and yet I knew next to nothing about the Omaha people. I did not know about the Pawnee, the Ponca, the Otoe and Missouria, the Lakota, the Dakota, the Iowa, or any of the many people who were living here long before my family became Americans.
I hadn't known—no one had ever told me—that I was a soldier in a war.
—the Antidote, p.217

He sounded like a boy to me, and I felt afraid for him. In Uz, simple enthusiasm is rarely met in kind.
—p.306

As you hold the tiny creature up to your face, its legs flail and stretch outward to appear more threatening. Its antennae swirl around, trying to make sense of its position in space. This is an animal on the defense, but only for a second, because the most notable quality of the craw is its supremely shitty attitude. They're the chihuahuas of the rocks, the Napoleons of the river. The craw is the ultimate curmudgeon. It raises its claws and swipes at your face. Come at me! I've never seen an animal so tiny yet so determined to kick my ass. The craw doesn't care how small it is or how big you are—it wants to take you down. Craw defense is craw offense.
—p±è.4-5

There should be an option for cars in this state that changes the low-fuel warning light—which generally blinks on at twenty miles until empty, accompanied by a polite little ding—to something more attention-grabbing. Like an electric shock on the driver's buttocks. And a foghorn. And it needs to flash when you've got seventy miles until empty, because beyond the city limits, fueling opportunities fade. If you're on country roads and miss your opportunity to fill that tank, there's a decent chance you'll be well and truly screwed. Look at a cell coverage map of West Virginia—the kind of help you'll get will have to come from a passerby.
—p.27

Much like Ben Franklin's unsuccessful attempt to make the turkey our national bird, opossums don't have that distinguished look you want in a representative species.
—p.35

Appalachian writers have a foot in two worlds: the world of language, of literature, and the world where we're looked down upon simply because of our area code. It doesn't matter that the last three letters of your name are "PhD" if the first three numbers are 304.
—p.70

We caught them, studied them, and released them. For injured individuals with a misshapen wing or a broken antenna, we created Lightning Bug Regional Hospital, a level one trauma center and skilled rehab facility. Managed by four seven-year-olds, routine insect care consisted of petting them and offering a pep talk: "It's okay, lightning bug. I'll squeeze you tight and love you until you're all better! Let's practice flying. Try to take off. Oh, you fell!"
Our success rate with firefly rehab was depressingly low. It's hard to imagine how a fumbling set of fingers and a heart full of obsessive love could possibly go wrong, but somehow, the more we caught, the more patients had to be admitted to our facility, which really should have been called Lightning Bug Memorial Hospital. Eventually, the CEO—my dad—stepped in and shut us down. Something about ethical violations.
—p.81

The mind struggles longer in its traps than any fox.
—p.38

"What's been set up and is playing out now is a Huge World Historical Battle between science and capitalism. Science is insisting more emphatically every day that this is a real and persistent danger. Capitalism is saying it isn't, because if it were true it would mean more government control of economies, more social justice (as a climate stabilization technique) and so on. These are the two big players in our civilization, so I say, be aware, watch the heavyweights go at it, and back science every chance you get. I speak to all fellow leftists around the world: science is now a leftism, and thank God; but capitalism is very very strong. So it's a dangerous moment. People who like their history dramatic and non-utopian should be pleased."
—Robinson, p.101

That's great

That's great—it starts with an earthquake
Birds 'n snakes 'n aeroplanes...
�"The End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)"

If you don't belong, you belong here.
—p.159