People From Illinois

"Crudely effective, but wildly inefficient."

"I ached everywhere. It was hard to separate the dull agony of the shattered leg from the ache in my head and my back and my guts. My skull felt as if there were a ball of mercury in it that shifted ponderously long seconds after my head itself turned. The vertigo made me sick again, but I had nothing left to vomit. I hung on the tangle of branches and contemplated the glories of adventure."

"Twenty kilometers. At an average speed of 120 klicks per hour, we should cover the distance in ten minutes. Ten freezing, adrenaline-pumping, gorge-rising, terror-beating-against-the-ribs, react-in-a-microsecond-or-die seconds."

"“Pascal’s Wager never appealed to me. It seems logically...shallow.” “Perhaps because it posits only two choices,” said Aenea. Somewhere in the desert night, an owl made a short, sharp sound. “Spiritual resurrection and immortality or death and damnation,” she said. “Those last two aren’t the same thing,” I said. “No, but perhaps to someone like Blaise Pascal they were. Someone terrified of ‘the eternal silence of these infinite spaces.’” “A spiritual agoraphobic,” I said. Aenea laughed. The sound was so sincere and spontaneous that I could not help loving it. Her. “Religion seems to have always offered that false duality,” she said, setting her cup of tea on a flat stone. “The silences of infinite space or the cozy comfort of inner certainty.”"

"“Perhaps our reservoir of spiritual faith has run out.” “Perhaps it should have run out a long time ago,” I said sternly. “Superstition has taken a terrible toll on our species. Wars...pogroms...resistance to logic and science and medicine...not to mention gathering power in the hands of people like those who run the Pax.”"

"I don’t think that I want to make any wager if it means dealing with a Church that has grown so corrupt that it makes obedience and submission the price of its saving the life of someone’s child."

"Dogma and hierarchy are endemic to such structures...indeed, such are the structures of any theocracy."

"I realized then what I had known since I was a child watching my mother die of cancer—namely, that beyond ideology and ambition, beyond thought and emotion, there was only pain. And salvation from it.”"

"“What?” “Never mind. It will make sense when it comes about. All improbabilities do when probability waves collapse into event.”"

"The human mind gets used to strangeness very quickly if it does not exhibit interesting behavior."

"I thought—To lose all this forever? And I hallucinated Aenea’s voice saying To lose all this forever is the essence of being human, my love."

"Each of them was intimately aware of the procedure for electing a pope—not only of the antiquated mechanisms, of course, but of the politicking, pressuring, deal-making, bluffing, and outright blackmail that had often accompanied the process over the centuries."

"“What was the Depression?” “Bad economic times in their pure capitalist nation-state,” Aenea said. “Remember, the economy wasn’t really global then, and it depended upon private money institutions called banks, gold reserves, and the value of physical money—actual coins and pieces of paper that were supposed to be worth something. It was all a consensual hallucination, of course, and in the 1930s, the hallucination turned nightmare.”"

"Life is brutal that way...the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction."

"Never make unsupportable assumptions about your enemies, Martin. It can be a fatal self-indulgence."

"Aenea smiled but her eyes still glistened. “Humans have been waiting for Jesus and Yahweh and E. T. to save their asses since before they covered those asses with bearskins and came out of the cave,” she said. “They’ll have to keep waiting. This is our business...our fight...and we have to take care of it ourselves.”"

"“And the sad fact is that all nanotech life out of our control—out of anyone’s control. The essence of nanotech life’s evolution is autonomy, self-will, and goals which have nothing to do with those of the harboring life form.” “Humanity, you mean,” said Lourdusamy. “Precisely.”"

"I began to understand. “A Faustian bargain...,” I said. “The Faustian bargain,” said the girl. “All the church had to do to gain the universe was sell its soul.”"

"One of the men in the boat—I could not remember which character—had moved through all of the circles of theological supposition: praying, believing that God was a merciful Deity who sat up nights worrying about him, then believing that God was a cruel bastard, and finally deciding that no one was listening."

"The universe is indifferent to our fates. This was the crushing burden that the character took with him as he struggled through the surf toward survival or extinction. The universe just does not give a shit."

"I realized that night the import and the terrible difficulty in the task ahead of me—in keeping this child safe from the sharp edges of a strange and indifferent universe. I think that is was on this alien and storm-tossed night that I first understood what it might be like to be a parent."

"I heard the hiss and felt the blessed numbness spreading. If there is a God, I thought, it’s a painkiller."

"De Soya blinks. “Suicide is a mortal sin,” he says. On the screen the girl nods seriously. “Yes,” she says, “but I am not a Christian. Also, I'd rather go to hell than go with you.”"

"Why am I seeking logic or sanity here? I'd asked myself at the moment. There hasn’t been any so far."

"“Entropy is a bitch,” I said. “Now, now,” said Aenea from where she was leaning on the terrace wall. “Entropy can be our friend.” “When?” I said. She turned around so that she was leaning back on her elbows. The building behind her was a dark rectangle, serving to highlight the glow of her sunburned skin. “It wears down empires,” she said. “And does in despotisms.”"

"Information is always to be treasured, Raul. It is behind only love and honesty in a person’s attempt to understand the universe."

"With a sudden clarity which went beyond the immediacy of his pain or sorrow, Sol Weintraub suddenly understood perfectly why Abraham had agreed to sacrifice Isaac, his son, when the Lord commanded him to do so. It was not obedience. It was not even to put the love of God above the love of his son. Abraham was testing God. By denying the sacrifice at the last moment, by stopping the knife, God had earned the right—in Abraham’s eyes and the hearts of his offspring—to become the God of Abraham."

"The modern universe, as machine and man had come to understand it, needed no Creator; in fact, allowed no Creator. Its rules allowed very little tinkering and no major revisions. It had not begun and would not end, beyond cycles of expansion and contraction as regular and self-regulated as the seasons on Old Earth. No room for love there. It seemed that Abraham had offered to murder his son to test a phantom."

"Religion and ethics were not always—or even frequently—mutually compatible. The demands of religious absolutism or fundamentalism or rampaging relativism often reflected the worst aspects of contemporary culture or prejudices rather than a system which both man and God could live under with a sense of real justice."

"I learned that poets aren’t God, but if there is a God...or anything approaching a God...he’s a poet. And a failed one at that."

"Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorizes as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic."

"I was not surprised to wake up alive. I suppose one is surprised only when one awakens dead."

"“Humanity has evolved—as far as it has evolved,” continued the old priest, “with no thanks to its predecessors or itself. Evolution brings human beings. Human beings, through a long and painful process, bring humanity.” “Empathy,” Aenea said softly."

"“Sometimes,” said General Morpurgo, taking her hand, “dreams are all that separate us from the machines.”"

"Christ may have lost his faith for a few seconds; He did not sell it in the marketplace for the trinkets of ego and curiosity."

"“Gold,” says the Consul, knowing that this is the only syllable that has held its power over the ages."

"He knew what had to be done. It is not always the same as knowing what to do."

"Have you considered that these prophecies were not divine revelations, but merely manipulation from some secular power?"

"Sol remembered the dream, remembered his daughter’s hug, and realized that in the end—when all else is dust—loyalty to those we love is all we can carry with us to the grave."

"Mobs have passions, not brains."

"The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer."

"The place was part museum, part library, and part archive; I loved it at first sight...and smell, for here there were thousands of printed books, many very old indeed, and nothing smells quite as wonderful as old books."

"Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them...they may be forced to die by them."

"“War does not call for judgment,” I said, “merely survival.”"

"My own guess is that it’s a myth fueled by the same hunger for superstitious verities that drives other religions."

"“I wish we had the technology to fight God on an equal basis,” he said in low, tight tones. “To beard him in his den. To fight back for all of the injustices heaped on humanity. To allow him to alter his smug arrogance or be blown to hell.”"

"There would be no more offerings. Not this day. Not any day. Humankind had suffered enough for its love of gods, its long search for God. He thought of the many centuries in which his people, the Jews, had negotiated with God, complaining, bickering, decrying the unfairness of things but always—always—returning to obedience at whatever the cost. Generations dying in the ovens of hatred. Future generations scarred by the cold fires of radiation and renewed hatred. Not this time. Not ever again."

"We are created for precisely this sort of suffering. In the end, it is all we are, those limpid tide pools of self-consciousness between crashing waves of pain."

"The future is never written...only penciled in."

"If our society ever opted for Orwell’s Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person’s activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove."