Eileen Prescott

“He looked down at the floor, at the shambles of the pieces he had made, and wiped his face with his arm. "Mother," he said, and stopped. Now Molly moved. Somehow, she reached him before he could speak again, and she held him tightly, and he held her, and they both wept.
"Sorry I busted everything."
"You'll make more."
"I wanted to show you."
"I looked at them all. They were very good--the hands especially."
"They were hard. The fingers were funny, but I couldn't make them not funny."
"Hands are the hardest of all.”
― Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang

“[A]ll knowledge goes through both stages, the annunciation out of noise into fact, and the disintegration back into noise again. The process involved was the making of increasingly finer distinctions. The outcome was an endless series of theoretical catastrophes.
The residuum was faith.”
― James Blish, A Case of Conscience

“A hundred writs and orders cross your desk every day, or are enacted in your name, Perfector," Yasnic said. "Men are beaten and imprisoned, hanged, deprived of their property--tortured, even."
"Wicked men," Culvern insisted. "Criminals, and those who would bring disorder to the streets of Ilmar!"
"God doesn't care. God judges those He heals and nobody else. You can't control the ripples once you've thrown the stone; you can only choose not to throw the stone.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, City of Last Chances

“Five thousand years of savagery, Barry had believed. But that was time measured on the steps of the pyramids, not by those who lived any part of it. Mark had led his people into a timeless period where the recurring seasons and the cycles of the heavens and of life, birth, and death marked their days. Now the joys of men and women, and their agonies, were private affairs that would come and go without a trace. In the timeless period, life became the goal, not the recreation of the past or the elaborate structuring of the future.”
― Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang