Jamie Wallace

“That's what scares me. My life is . . . it. There's nothing else, on either end of it. I don't have remnants in the same way that you do, or a plate inside my chest. I don't know what my pieces were before they were me, and I don't know what they'll become after. All I have is right now, and at some point, I'll just end, and I can't predict when that will be, and - and if I don't use this time for something, if I don't make the absolute most of it, then I'll have wasted something precious.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“You keep asking why your work is not enough, and I don’t know how to answer that, because it is enough to exist in the world and marvel at it. You don’t need to justify that, or earn it. You are allowed to just live.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“It is difficult for anyone born and raised in human infrastructure to truly internalize the fact that your view of the world is backward. Even if you fully know that you live in a natural world that existed before you and will continue long after, even if you know that the wilderness is the default state of things, and that nature is not something that only happens in carefully curated enclaves between towns, something that pops up in empty spaces if you ignore them for a while, even if you spend your whole life believing yourself to be deeply in touch with the ebb and flow, the cycle, the ecosystem as it actually is, you will still have trouble picturing an untouched world. You will still struggle to understand that human constructs are carved out and overlaid, that these are the places that are the in-between, not the other way around.”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built

“If you understand that robots' lack of purpose - our refusal of your purpose - is the crowning mark of our intellectual maturity, why do you put so much energy in seeking the opposite?”
― Becky Chambers, A Psalm for the Wild-Built