TOTO

“Oxygen was – to quote Mikhail Elesco, the team’s top geologist – a needy bastard that couldn’t stand not to be in a relationship, no matter how toxic.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Memory

“Athshe, which meant the Forest, and the World. So Earth, Terra, meant both the soil and the planet, two meanings and one. But to the Athsheans soil, ground, earth was not that to which the dead return and by which the living live: the substance of their world was not earth, but forest. Terran man was clay, red dust. Athshean man was branch and root. They did not carve figures of themselves in stone, only in wood.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

“Ugly as hell, but it was the sort of thing only women would do to their hair, and so it was provocative.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World is Forest

“So how does the massively complicated brain, with its eighty-six billion neurons, get built from such a small recipe book? The answer pivots on a clever strategy implemented by the genome: build incompletely and let world experience refine. Thus, for humans at birth, the brain is remarkably unfinished, and interaction with the world is necessary to complete it.”
― David Eagleman, Livewired: The Inside Story of the Ever-Changing Brain