Sierra

“But greed like that didn't start out bad. What alters wanting is what's behind it. Greed and hope aren't opposites. Greed and hope are twins grabbing for the same thing, one in fear and one in faith.”
― Eiren Caffall, All the Water in the World

“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

“I look up and see the stars.

Well, no. It's daytime. But I see pinpoints of day in irregular patterns across the curved upper surface of what must be a ridiculously tall chamber. Definite patterns, and there's no way I can talk myself out of seeing it as anything other than a map. A star map...The ancient cultures of Earth have imbued the stars with significance since prehistory. Why wouldn't you? They're your calendar and your clock, the universe's own way of measuring the year for you. I stand there in the dark, and for a moment I can forget the dire peril we're in because a wave of wonder washes over me. The thought that maybe this is a constant of intelligence, anywhere you can see the sky and have eyes to do it with. Does all life of sufficient complexity look up after sunset and wonder at the lights and what they mean?”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Alien Clay

“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