Zana > Recent Status Updates

“Synthbodies were originally designed to be fail-safes, after all. The Great Ships had left Earth with two dozen of them in storage as humanity’s insurance against the loss of key officers to accidents, disease, or off-world dangers. According to historical accounts, many people at the time were still vehemently opposed to full-body neuroprosthetics, describing them as a ghastly perversion of nature...”

Gross

“Oh, gosh! She wore all black, from head to toe covered over like an Arab woman. A black veil was over her head and face. Was she a widow? A Moslem? She looked so mysterious.”

I'm dead

‘“I want you to solemnly promise that if anything ever happens to me, be it tomorrow, or years from now, you swear that you will never, so help you God, hide Bart and Jory in the attic so you can go unencumbered into another marriage!”’

Incest-ception

“The love they had for each other seemed to me very different from the love I saw between the parents of the few friends I had. Their love seemed more intense, more tumultuous, more passionate. Whenever they thought no one was watching they locked eyes, and they had to reach out and touch whenever they passed one another.”

Jamie and Cersei Lannister coded

“I suspected Emma waited on Bart more than me because he spilled when he tried to pour his own milk. He dropped when he carried a glass of water. There wasn’t anything he could hold on to, and nothing he could keep from bumping into. Tables fell, lamps toppled.”

Jesus Bart

Nooooo a POV switch 😩

“A fatal injury to an ordinary human isn’t the same for a second stager. The ... abdomen splits like cleaved rubber, pink tissue flayed open, milky liquid sluicing out with a consistency too viscous to be blood. Isako glimpses clear tubing, some sort of rigid polymer structure, no guts or organs.”

😳

“What of all the people on the other side of the earth that the camera can’t see, and everybody in the southern hemisphere which is in night and gulped up by the darkness of space? Are they in the photograph? In truth, nobody is in that photograph, nobody can be seen....”

👁️👄👁️

“And in time we come to see that not only are we on the sidelines of the universe but that it’s of a universe of sidelines, that there is no centre, just a giddy mass of waltzing things, and that perhaps the entirety of our understanding consists of an elaborate and ever-evolving knowledge of our own extraneousness, a bashing away of mankind’s ego by the instruments of scientific enquiry...”

So deep

“...all beings are living in life-support machines commonly called bodies and all of these will fail eventually.”

Deep

“There’s a lot of contemplation of how it’s possible to get nowhere very fast.”

Me contemplating about how this book is going nowhere very slowly

“They find it everywhere, this happiness, springing forth from the blandest of places – from the experiment decks, from within the sachets of risotto and chicken cassoulet, from the panels of screens, switches and vents, from the brutally cramped titanium, Kevlar and steel tubes in which they’re trapped, from the very floors which are walls and the walls which are ceilings and the ceilings....”

2deep4u

“Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams – of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses....”

Oh so this is one of those books huh

Okay let's see how bad this is

Her professor turned into a giant frog and kissed her???? 🐸

“...She was never a great mother, but she was a good mentor—that’s also what she used to believe, before last week.”

Damn lady

‘“He gave his ex-wife’s synthbody to his bodyguard?”’

Ewww

‘“I was gonna say that your new hairstyle’s growing on me, but not anymore. You look like all the other suburban girls who think a Reality Bites soundtrack and a vintage jacket constitute a personality and actual music taste. Next, you’ll be smoking cloves, writing in Moleskines.’

Damn Ruth no chill

‘[Howard Jones] recounts that locals came to him, time and time again, and asked, with genuine mystification: “We just don’t understand America. You were once a colony. You know what colonialism is. You fought and bled and died for your freedom. How can you possibly support the status quo?”’

‘“Besides, you’re only taking into account people to whom you personally served notices. What about all the work you’ve done that helped a client’s division at the expense of another? Work that led to reductions you didn’t even see. You could never make it through a list of all those names.”

She’s cruelly satisfied at Kob’s silence and downcast demeanor....’

She's such a bitch (relatable)

“If Freeman had performed the same lobotomy on me as an adult, they said, I would have been a vegetable. That’s how badly damaged my brain was. I wouldn’t have been able to survive outside of an institution. I would have stayed at Agnews forever.

But my brain, when Freeman got to it, was young. It was still growing. After the surgery, it adapted to the lobotomy and found ways to compensate for it....”

“Many times I have wondered, Where were the authorities? Freeman wasn’t a licensed psychiatrist. How could he determine on the basis of a couple of short office visits with me that I had been schizophrenic since the age of four? And why would anyone accept his diagnosis anyway without insisting that I be seen by someone with the proper training?”

Wait what

‘“Does it hurt you to see those ice picks in his eyes?”

That question made my dad angry. “Do you want me in the hospital—sick, lame, or lazy?” he barked. “Because what you’re doing is asking me to dwell on something unpleasant and painful. And why should I? Looking at it will do what?”’

Jesus

“In other words, he poked these knitting needles into my skull, through my eye sockets, and then swirled them around until he felt he had scrambled things up enough. Then he took a picture of me with the needles in, and that was that.”

Wtf

“It had taken less than two months, and four visits from Lou, and four visits with me, to convince Dr. Freeman that a transorbital lobotomy was the only answer to our family’s problems. That’s how easily the decision was made.”

“Finally, she said that she’s being plagued by dreams of Howard. In one of these, which keeps recurring, she wants to spank him but finds that she has no right arm, that it’s just a weak little nub, and she interprets this as meaning that she’ll never be able to spank him. Another time a dream recurred twice that she had her teeth all set to sink in to him and woke to find herself biting the pillow.”

“The surgeries sometimes went badly. A Washington, D.C., police officer hemorrhaged after his lobotomy and became a vegetable. Leucotomes broke off in patients’ heads. One patient died on the operating table when Freeman stopped, mid-surgery, to take a photograph.”

‘He often visited patients after their surgeries and pronounced them “cured” or “improved” because their worst symptoms had disappeared. But he made these visits four or five days after the surgery, when they were still barely conscious. Many of them would experience a complete return of their anxiety, or their hysteria, or their depression...’

‘He returned to Lisbon, and in late 1935 began performing similar frontal lobe experiments on human beings. Moniz called the process “psychosurgery.” He drilled holes in his patients’ heads, and made cuts in their frontal lobes, using a tool he called a “leucotome.” He called the procedure itself a “leucotomy.”

Moniz believed this was a promising treatment for mental illness....’

“But all six of the psychiatrists, I found out later, said my behavior was normal. Four of them even said the problem in the house was with her. They said she was the one who could benefit from treatment....”

Talk about an evil stepmom. Good LORD