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This Is How You Lose the Time War

Book by Amal El-Mohtar · 39 quotes · Love, Deep, Hunger

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This Is How You Lose the Time War Quotes

“Hunger, Red - to sate a hunger or to stroke it, to feel hunger as a furnace, to trace its edges like teeth - is this a thing you, singly, know? Have you ever had a hunger that whetted itself on what you fed it, sharpened so keen and bright that it might split you open, break a new thing out? Sometimes I think that's what I have instead of friends.”

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“I shudder to imagine an equal and opposite incursion—may causality forbid Commandant ever dispatch me to one of your viny-hivey elfworlds, profusely floral, all arcing elder trees, neural pollen, bees gathering memories from eyes and tongue, honey libraries dripping knowledge from the comb. I harbor no illusions I’d succeed. You would find me in an instant, crush me faster—I’d walk a swath of rot through your verdancy, no matter how light I tried to step. I have a Cherenkov-green thumb.”

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“I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.”

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“The thought of your disembodied network repulses me, but I look at you, Red, and see much of myself: a desire to be apart, sometimes, to under stand who I am without the rest. And what I retum to, the me-ness that I know as pure, inescapable self is hunger. Desire. Longing, this longing to possess, to become, to break like a wave on a rock and reform, and break again, and wash away. This is a necessary part of any ecosystem, but it unsettles others, this inability to be satisfied. It is diffcult-it is very difficult, to befriend where you wish to consume, to find those who, when they ask "Do I have you still", when they end a letter with "Yours", mean it in any substantive way.”

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“But I enjoy eating these days. More of us do than care to admit it publicly. I revel in it, as one only revels in pursuits one does not need. The runner enjoys running when she need not ee a lion. Sex improves when decoupled—sorry—from animalist procreative desperation (or even from the desperation of not having had sex in a while, as I’ve had cause to note after my recent two decades’ sojourn and attendant dry spell). I bite blueberry pancakes drizzled with maple syrup, extra butter—that expanding u, the berry’s pop against my teeth, butter’s bloom in my mouth. I explore sweetnesses and textures. I’m never hungry, so I don’t race to the next bite. I eat glass, and as it cuts my gums, I savor minerals, metals, impurities; I see the beach from which some poor bastard skimmed the sand. Small rocks taste of the river, of rubbed sh scale, of glaciers long gone. They crunch, crisp, celery-like. I share the sensation with fellow acionados; they share theirs with me, though there’s lag, and sensor granularity remains an issue. So, a roundabout way of saying: I love to eat.”

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“un sobre, un objeto físico sin tan siquiera una copia de seguridad en la nube, todos los datos en un frágil fragmento de papel, y [...] una firma ideográfica! ¡Que informa a todo el mundo que la manipula de quién es el remitente, de qué posición social ocupa e incluso de su propósito! Es una locura... desde el punto de vista de la seguridad”

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