Isabel Brady

“History too has an inertia. In the four dimensions of spacetime, particles (or events) have directionality; mathematicians, trying to show this, draw what they call “world lines” on graphs. In human affairs, individual world lines form a thick tangle, curling out of the darkness of prehistory and stretching through time: a cable the size of Earth itself, spiraling round the sun on a long curved course. That cable of tangled world lines is history. Seeing where it has been, it is clear where it is going – it is a matter of simple extrapolation. For what kind of Δ v would it take to escape history, to escape an inertia that powerful, and carve a new course? The hardest part is leaving Earth behind.”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars

“What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?”
― Sally Rooney, Beautiful World, Where Are You

“You know, that might be the answer—to act boastfully about something we ought to be ashamed of. That’s a trick that never seems to fail.” “Do you think it will work?” “I’m sure it will. And let’s promote him to captain, too, just to make certain.”
― Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“Don’t ye love sperm?”
― Herman Melville, Moby-Dick or, The Whale