Melissa E.

“My point is that life on earth can take care of itself. In the thinking of a human being, a hundred years in a long time. A hundred years ago, we didn't have cars and airplanes and computers and vaccines...It was a whole different world. But to the earth, a hundred years is *nothing*. A million years is *nothing*. This planet lives and breathes on a much vaster scale. We can't imagine its slow and powerful rhythms, and we haven't got the humility to try. We have been residents here for the blink of an eye. If we are gone tomorrow, the earth will not miss us."

- Ian Malcolm”
― Michael Crichton, Jurassic Park

“So let me teach you something, Chief: in aggregate, humans are slow. You can pack a colony with the brightest, sharpest, most perceptive minds ever born into our species, and without any outside influences they’ll become selfish, self-serving, and slow to change. Intelligence does not help. In some situations, it makes things worse.”
― Elizabeth Bonesteel, Breach of Containment

“He had made tiny pipes of feathers he had found along the streets; birds answered him here as they had in the hinterlands. A night-bird, singing back to his playing, showed him the loose bar in the iron fence, the furrowed earth along which the bar swung sideways, that told him, as the bird did, that others came here secretly. Around him, the sleeping city dreamed, tossed fretfully, muttered, dreamed again.”
― Patricia A. McKillip, Song for the Basilisk

“In the training vids, enemies were always expert and organized, with a strategy discernible after a few minutes of observation. In reality, colony squabbles were almost always made up of a bunch of homeowners engaged in a deadly slap-fight with their neighbors.”
― Elizabeth Bonesteel, Breach of Containment