Words&Dirt

“Shattered civilizations breed more than flies and cholera. They also breed discontent, fear, and openness to new perspectives.”

––American Stories: Living American History, Vol. II: From 1865, by Jason Ripper, pg. 206

“The fact that their actions all seemed to serve the purposes of something else, some vast distributed network slouching toward Bethlehem––sheer coincidence, perhaps. Perhaps we really do act for the reasons we believe. Perhaps everything’s right on the surface, brightly lit and primary colored. Perhaps Daniel Brüks and Rakshi Sengupta and Jim Moore––each burning for their own kind of redemption––all just happened to end up in the white-hot radiance of solar orbit, obsessed enough to rush in where Angels feared to tread.

Perhaps it really was Daniel Brüks, on some level, who had just murdered his last and only friend…”

––Echopraxia, by Peter Watts, pg. 348