Raif

“Limits of survival are set by climate, those long drifts of change which a generation may fail to notice. And it is the extremes of climate which set the pattern. Lonely, finite humans may observe climatic provinces, fluctuations of annual weather and, occasionally may observe such things as “This is a colder year than I’ve ever known.” Such things are sensible. But humans are seldom alerted to the shifting average through a great span of years. And it is precisely in this alerting that humans learn how to survive on any planet. They must learn climate. —ARRAKIS, THE TRANSFORMATION AFTER HARQ AL-ADA”
― Frank Herbert, Children of Dune

“Last came one of the strange beings from the system of Palador. It was nameless, like all its kind, for it possessed no identity of its own, being merely a mobile but still dependent cell in the consciousness of its race. Though it and its fellows had long been scattered over the galaxy in the exploration of countless worlds, some unknown link still bound them together as inexorably as the living cells in a human body. When a creature of Palador spoke, the pronoun it used was always ‘We’. There was not, nor could there ever be, any first person singular in the language of Palador.”
― Arthur C. Clarke, The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke