Icarus

“I hate the Quelin,” she said. “They’re stupid and jerks and nobody likes them.” She lowered her voice surreptitiously as they entered the elevator. “If we smoked it now really fast, do you think they’d notice?”
― Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet

“A room without books is like a body without a soul.”
― Marcus Tullius Cicero

“The guilt lingered, even so. Ghosts were imaginary, but hauntings were real.”
― Becky Chambers, Record of a Spaceborn Few

“Dance was curious in its near universality. Not all species had dance in their cultures, but most did, and those that did not latched onto the idea once exposed to it... Sidra had watched a lot of archival footage of dance, but fascinating as that was from a cultural perspective, she enjoyed the improvised madness of a multispecies gathering much more. In the pit, she'd observed, it didn't matter what your limbs looked like, or how you liked to move. So long as there was a beat and warm bodies nearby, you could do whatever felt good...
The kit responded, changing its posture into something Sidra hadn't experienced before. The limbs were no longer pressed close to the torso, the back no longer straight. What had been tension and angles was now a harmony of curves, rocking, swaying, shifting... A curious sense of delight began to warm up Sidra's pathways.”
― Becky Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit