Before the people at the customer service desk even hand her the phone, she knows. And all the way home to Illinois she thinks: How do I recognize this already? Why does this all feel so much like remembering?
Clipping
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books > The Overstory: A Novel (Richard Powers)
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books > The Overstory: A Novel (Richard Powers)
You have given me a thing I could never have imagined, before I knew you. It’s like I had the word “book,” and you put one in my hands. I had the word “game,” and you taught me how to play. I had the word “life,” and then you came along and said, “Oh! You mean this.” He says there’s nothing on Earth he can give to her, for their anniversary, to thank her for what she has given him.
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books > The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade) (Dickinson, Seth)
Understood what the books and the generals always repeated: that armies did not kill each other, they broke each other, that the day would be won when one army believed it could not survive.
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books > The Traitor Baru Cormorant (The Masquerade) (Dickinson, Seth)
Baru saw in the city what she felt in herself. The two-faced allegiances, the fearful monitoring of self and surroundings, the whimpering need to please somehow kneeling alongside marrow-deep defiance. One eye set on a future of glittering wealthy subservience, the other turned to a receding and irretrievable freedom.
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books > Fine Structure (Sam Hughes)
“Do you believe in God?” “If by that you mean, do I believe that there exist multidimensional beings of colossal scale and intelligence in planes of reality far above ours, with powers and abilities which would appear in our reality to resemble omnipotence, capable, even, of deterministically predicting human behaviour to great accuracy, before whom our entire universe, all its physical extent along with its past, present and future, is as insignificant nanotechnology, then yes.
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books > The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (McKillip, Patricia A.)
“This bond I draw between you: that though you are parted in mind or in body, there will be a call in the core of you, one to the other, that nothing, no one else will answer to. By the secrets of earth and water, this bond is woven, unbreakable, irrevocable; by the law that created fire and wind this call is set in you, in life and beyond life .
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books > The Forgotten Beasts of Eld (McKillip, Patricia A.)
“But one day you will find out how good it is to have someone who chooses to come when you call.”
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books > Crash Early, Crash Often (Ribbonfarm Roughs Book 3) (Venkatesh Rao)
The terminally irrational person is usually the one reaching for game theory or Bayes’ formula. The coward is usually the guy with the bigger gun. You haven’t seen fraternal hatred until you’ve seen an egalitarian argument among a bunch of hippies in a commune of universal love. There is nobody more tribal and mortally afraid of being alone than the Brave Individualist Randian Entrepreneur.
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books > Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships (Berne, Eric)
An American mail carrier who goes to Tokyo to help a Japanese postman on his rounds, or an American ear-nose-and-throat specialist who spends his holiday working in a Haitian hospital, will very likely feel just as refreshed and have just as good stories to tell as if he had gone lion hunting in Africa or spent the time driving through transcontinental highway traffic.
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books > The Years of Rice and Salt (Kim Stanley Robinson)
Invisible worlds, full of energy and power: subatomic harems, each pulsing on the edge of a great explosion. Budur sighed as this image came to her. There was no escaping the latent violence at the heart of things. Even the stones were mortal.