Sierra

“One night on the roof of Amen, tending to the fire that we kept going in a scavenged washing machine drum, I asked Keller why he chose bugs and not God. He laughed, shook his head, brushed ash from his hands, scratched the beard growing in on his soft jawline. 'I have everything of the infinite in insects, Nonie. Do you know how many there are?'

'No. How many?'

'Nine hundred thousand kinds named, little warrior, maybe thirty million unidentified...we thought there were maybe ten quintillion individual insects alive on the planet. With this weather, even factoring in the extinctions, I'm sure there are lots more than that'. He laughed. 'Largest biomass there is on the Earth'.”
― Eiren Caffall, All the Water in the World

“All along, for weeks now, some part of her mind had been consumed with it: the certainty that the face she'd glimpsed among the dancers in the desert ruin was the face of God. It was the Queen of Heaven, Thalia. Back before. In another life.

Human hands had made the idol. And then they did, they'd had a human face in mind. That was the nucleus. The seed. The flash of warmth. Heretical as it was, as little sense as it made, she knew there was a person in there.”
― Grace Curtis, Idolfire

“There wasn't much left, but in Leningrad in the siege in the war the curators stayed and ate restorer's paste to stay alive and wrapped the dead and laid them in the basement until the thaw and chipped the ice off the paintings while the siege went on outside. All that mattered was that the art remained. Even if they could have run away across Lake Ladoga and into the edges of the taiga forest and hidden with what they knew, they wouldn't have left. They belonged to the art and the art belonged to them and it was a sacred duty. But so was the vision of what it would be one day when the siege was over and the windows replaced and the broken walls repaired and the museum alive again for everyone, for the world that mattered, the one they wanted.”
― Eiren Caffall, All the Water in the World

“Maybe happiness only exists in fragments. Maybe it is only the absence of grief.”
― Marie Lu, Red City