Dolorous Haze

“Family is only the tribe in microcosm. Long ago Thoacdiens realized—since their business is information, and information is not static—that, technology aside, the prime source of their capital was the unbridled imagination of each individual in each successive generation. The family is not only an inefficient system, it is a cruel one. The whole object of the family is to repeat itself, to create the future in the image of the past. Consequently it is a very effective brake on change because it keeps all children within the boundaries of cultural tradition. In the family learning is a process of psychological brutality at the end of which a child knows nothing but what is permissible to the tribe. There is no future, and no joy in the family—only the long, agonized, destructive groan of the continual death of the past. Once in a while there is friendship, but that is the exception, not the rule.”
― Mary Staton, From the Legend of Biel

“A man is attracted to a woman, a woman to a man, and with each step they take towards each other they lose something of themselves: a series of defeats, where they had hoped for victories.”
― Karin Boye, Kallocain

“The sun began its dip behind the horizon and the walls sunk to augmented beige, and he could feel his body in the walls forty years later.”
― B.R. Yeager, Amygdalatropolis

“I wondered about the masterminds who were directing all the mayhem. Did they really hope to survive? Or was I missing the point? Did they intend, instead, to incinerate themselves and all of us with them? Like mummified pharaohs and their entombed slaves. Why do that? Maybe just to prove that they owned the world. After all, you don’t own something unless you can destroy it.”
― Stepan Chapman, The Troika