Lyr

“Holsten stared at him for a long while, thinking through the implications of that: thinking about Earth’s long history before the fall, before the ice came. His society has possessed such a fragmented, imperfect understanding of the predecessors that they were constantly trying to ape, and did even that poor record now boil down to just himself, the contents of the one old man’s head? All that history, and if … when I die …? He did not see anyone having time to attend history classes in Karst’s new survivalist Eden.
He shivered – not from the usual human sense of mortality, but from a feeling of vast, invisible things falling away into oblivion, irretrievable and irreplaceable. Grimy he turned to the message that Alpash was now showing him.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky

“Ah, I could tell you everything about her. Who she was, how we met, the color of her eyes, and the shape of her nose. I can see her, right in front of me. She's more real than you are.”
― George R.R. Martin, A Dance with Dragons

“That thought, I can’t find the right words, is based not on something negative but on something positive. On the positive awareness that art is something great and higher than our own skill or knowledge or learning. That art is something which though produced by human hands, is not wrought by hands alone, but wells up from a deeper source, from man’s soul, while much of the proficiency and technical expertise associated with art reminds me of what would be called self-righteousness in religion.”
― Vincent van Gogh, The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

“But the hearts that once adored me
Have long forgot their vow
And the friends that mustered round me
Have all forsaken now

‘Twas in a dream revealed to me
But not a dreamt of sleep
A dream of watchful agony
Of grief that would not weep

Now do not harshly turn away”
― Emily Brontë, The Complete Poems