I was acutely aware that of the three of us, I was the only one visible to the Mundane; to a casual observer I would appear to be arguing with nobody in a cemetery in the middle of the night. I prayed that it was dark enough to hide the
...more
“Sounds like the start of a joke, right? Two scientists, an engineer, a detective, a lawyer, and an artist walk into a bar to help me become God.”
― Nona the Ninth
― Nona the Ninth
“As had happened with Julius Caesar, it turned out that the people of Rome were actually quite keen on Gaius and were not fans of presumptuous senators and magistrates making unilateral decisions about the nature of Roman government with swords. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, they believed, not from some farcical bloody murder. Strange men in corridors distributing stab wounds was no basis for a system of government.”
― A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome
― A Fatal Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum: Murder in Ancient Rome
“There is a noise that is different to grief. Sadness wails and cries and lets loose a sound to the heavens like a baby calling for its mother. That kind of noisy grief is hopeful. It believes that things can be put right, or that help can come. There is a different kind of sound to that. Babies left alone too long do not even cry. They become very still and quiet. They know no one is coming.”
― The Power
― The Power
“Many of the institutions of modern society, after all, are designed to enhance our natural capacities for cooperation, by punishing non-cooperators and encouraging the rest of us to pursue even relatively mundane collective actions, like paying taxes and getting flu shots. And so, when pandemics unfold, it's not just because peculiarly aggressive pathogens have exploited passively oblivious victims or because we've inadvertently provided them with ample transmission opportunities. It's also because our deeply rooted, highly nuanced capacity for cooperative action failed.”
― Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond
― Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond
“Camilla, we did it right, didn't we?" Palamedes said, and now Nona knew he wasn't speaking to anyone else in the universe. "We had something very nearly perfect... the perfect friendship, the perfect love. I cannot imagine reaching the end of this life and having any regrets, so long as I had been allowed to experience being your adept.”
― Nona the Ninth
― Nona the Ninth
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