Sonja

“He looks away from me, covering his mouth.
“What are you laughing at.”
He looks down, but waves his hand at me. “You—your—”
I refuse to look down at myself. “My what, Snow?”
“Your hair.”
I refuse to touch my hair.
“You look like that guy, with the wig—” He mimes playing the piano. “Duh, duh, duh, duhhh.”
“Beethoven?”
“I don’t know his name. With the big wig. There was a film about him.”
“Mozart. You’re saying I look like Mozart.”
“You’ve got to look, Baz, it’s a scream.”
― Wayward Son, Rainbow Rowell

“Simon looks over at me. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“What?!” he shouts. He can’t hear a thing I’m saying over the wind and the engine and the classic rock.
“I hate this fucking car!” I shout back.

“The sun is burning me! I might actually catch fire, at any moment!” The wind is blowing Simon’s hair straight, and he’s squinting—from the sun and from all the smiling.
“What!” he shouts at me again.
“You’re so beautiful!” I shout back.
He turns the radio down, so now there’s just the wind and the engine noise to shout over.
“What’d you say?!”
“Nothing!”
― Wayward Son, Rainbow Rowell

“My favourite part of kissing Simon when he’s cold is the way he goes warm in my hands. Like I’m the living campfire. Like I’m the one who lives. I warm him in my arms, and then he warms me in his. He gives it all back to me.
I’d give him all that I am. I’d give him all that I was. I’d open up a vein.
I’d tie our hearts together, chamber by chamber.”
― Wayward Son, Rainbow Rowell

“I wish you well, explorer, but I wonder: Does the same fate that befell me await you? I can only imagine that it must, that the tendency toward equilibrium is not a trait peculiar to our universe but inherent in all universes. Perhaps that is just a limitation of my thinking, and your people have discovered a source of pressure that is truly eternal. But my speculations are fanciful enough already. I will assume that one day your thoughts too will cease, although I cannot fathom how far in the future that might be. Your lives will end just as ours did, just as everyone’s must. No matter how long it takes, eventually equilibrium will be reached. I hope you are not saddened by that awareness. I hope that your expedition was more than a search for other universes to use as reservoirs. I hope that you were motivated by a desire for knowledge, a yearning to see what can arise from a universe’s exhalation. Because even if a universe’s life span is calculable, the variety of life that is generated within it is not. The buildings we have erected, the art and music and verse we have composed, the very lives we’ve led: none of them could have been predicted, because none of them was inevitable. Our universe might have slid into equilibrium emitting nothing more than a quiet hiss. The fact that it spawned such plenitude is a miracle, one that is matched only by your universe giving rise to you.”
― Ted Chiang, Exhalation