A Million Little Fibers Quotes

She had thought that industrial production was a value not to be questioned by anyone; she had thought that these men’s urge to expropriate the factories of others was their acknowledgment of the factories’ value. She, born of the industrial revolution, had not held as conceivable, had forgotten along with the tales of astrology and alchemy, what these men knew in their secret, furtive souls, knew not by means of thought, but by means of that nameless muck which they called their instincts and emotions: that so long as men struggle to stay alive, they’ll never produce so little but that the man with the club won’t be able to seize it and leave them still less, provided millions of them are willing to submit—that the harder their work and the less their gain, the more submissive the fiber of their spirit—that men who live by pulling levers at an electric switchboard, are not easily ruled, but men who live by digging the soil with their naked fingers, are—that the feudal baron did not need electronic factories in order to drink his brains away out of jeweled goblets, and neither did the rajahs of the People’s State of India. She saw what they wanted and to what goal their “instincts,” which they called unaccountable, were leading them. She saw that Eugene Lawson, the humanitarian, took pleasure at the prospect of human starvation—and Dr. Ferris, the scientist, was dreaming of the day when men would return to the hand-plow.

is a little-known fact that nearly 95 percent of communications traffic between continents—including e-mail, phone calls, videos, and financial transfers—travels not by air or through space but via underwater fiber-optic cable—close to one million miles of it. And the demand is growing.

Water isn’t actually part of a waterfall. It simply passes through the falls and then it is gone,” Cap replies. “In the same way, every aspect of your lives is transitory. From the two million blood cells that die every second within your arteries to your skin, your hair, your bones, the fiber of your muscles, the neurons in your brain. None of them last much more than a handful of years. They just trickle a little slower over the rocks. You are water cascading down the side of a cliff, only you don’t know it. And one day, the river will run dry.” Dante falls silent. “Everything about you is fleeting. Everything except for one thing—consciousness. That’s the only thing that remains constant throughout your entire lives.