Mortal Engines Quotes

You aren't a hero and I'm not beautiful and we probably won't live happily ever after " she said. "But we're alive and together and we're going to be all right.

It was a dark, blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea.

Is it...dead?" asked Tom, his voice all quivery with fright. "A town just ran over him," said Hester. "I shouldn't think he's very well...

he cut through the 21st Century Gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal headed gods of lost America

The old curator of ceramics lay near the door, looking indignant, as if death was a silly modern fad that he rather disapproved of.

Was this what falling in love was like? Not something big and amazing that you knew about straight away, like in a story, but a slow thing that crept over you in waves until you woke up one day and found that you were head-over-heels with someone quite unexpected

Hey!” he said. “That’s one of my best shirts!” “So?” she replied without looking up. “It’s one of my best legs.

An Engineer is no match for a Historian with his dander up!

He smiled faintly, like somebody who had never seen a smile, but had read a book on how to do it.

She wanted to stop, but she was riding a wave of memory and it was carrying her backward to that night, that room, and the blood that had spattered her mother's star charts like the map of a new constellation.

And now he was dead, his soul fled down to the Sunless Country and his body lying cold in the cold mud, somewhere in the city's wake.

On a long flight, after periods of crisis and many hours of fatigue, mind and body may become disunited until at times they seem completely different elements, as though the body were only a home with which the mind has been associated but by no means bound. Consciousness grows independent of the ordinary senses. You see without assistance from the eyes, over distances beyond the visual horizon. There are moments when existence appears independent even of the mind. The importance of physical desire and immediate surroundings is submerged in the apprehension of universal values. For unmeasurable periods, I seem divorced from my body, as though I were an awareness spreading out through space, over the earth and into the heavens, unhampered by time or substance, free from the gravitation that binds to heavy human problems of the world. My body requires no attention. It's not hungry. It's neither warm or cold. It's resigned to being left undisturbed. Why have I troubled to bring it here? I might better have left it back at Long Island or St. Louis, while the weightless element that has lived within it flashes through the skies and views the planet. This essential consciousness needs no body for its travels. It needs no plane, no engine, no instruments, only the release from flesh which circumstances I've gone through make possible. Then what am I – the body substance which I can see with my eyes and feel with my hands? Or am I this realization, this greater understanding which dwells within it, yet expands through the universe outside; a part of all existence, powerless but without need for power; immersed in solitude, yet in contact with all creation? There are moments when the two appear inseparable, and others when they could be cut apart by the merest flash of light. While my hand is on the stick, my feet on the rudder, and my eyes on the compass, this consciousness, like a winged messenger, goes out to visit the waves below, testing the warmth of water, the speed of wind, the thickness of intervening clouds. It goes north to the glacial coasts of Greenland, over the horizon to the edge of dawn, ahead to Ireland, England, and the continent of Europe, away through space to the moon and stars, always returning, unwillingly, to the mortal duty of seeing that the limbs and muscles have attended their routine while it was gone.

Have you ever been caught off guard by the sound of your own heartbeat? Maybe you’ve pressed your ear weirdly on your pillow, and now all you can hear is your own proof of life. You are confronted with your mortality in a base, clock-ticking kind of way: you have an engine room, and it has a finite timeline. What a miracle and a privilege.

It would be best to stride in with a cheer "hello!", but she wasn't the cheery sort; she was the "lurking in dark corners" sort. She found a dark corner, behind the Stalker-cases, and lurked.

His tunic lay on the mud nearby, but he couldn't find his shirt at all, until he crawled closer to the scarred girl and realized that she was busily tearing it into strips which she was using to bandage her wounded leg. "Hey!" he said. "That's one of my best shirts!" "So?" she replied without looking up. "It's one of my best legs.

Outside, Melliphant's ear flattened itself against the wood of the door like a pale slug.

He cut through the 21st Century gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal-headed gods of lost America.

Waste not, want not’ is the Engineers’ motto, Miss. Properly processed human ordure makes very useful fuel for our city’s engines. And we are experimenting with ways of turning it into a tasty and nutritious snack. We feed our prisoners on nothing else. Unfortunately they keep dying. But that is just a temporary setback, I’m sure.

He ran across the main hall and down galleries full of things that had somehow survived through all the millennia since the Ancients destroyed themselves in that terrible flurry of orbit-to-earth atomics and tailored-virus bombs called the Sixty Minute War.

Crome smiles. “Do you really think I am so shortsighted?” he asks. “The Guild of Engineers plans further ahead than you suspect. London will never stop moving. Movement is life. When we have devoured the last wandering city and demolished the last static settlement we will begin digging. We will build great engines, powered by the heat of the earth’s core, and steer our planet from its orbit. We will devour Mars, Venus, and the asteroids. We shall devour the sun itself, and then sail on across the gulf of space. A million years from now our city will still be traveling, no longer hunting towns to eat, but whole new worlds!

Science does not concern itself with those properties of existence to which ridiculousness belongs. Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it. What do we really know about the origin of the Universe? A blank so wide can be filled with myths and legends. I wished, in my mythologizing, to reach the limits of improbability, and I believe that I came close. You know this already, therefore what you really wanted to ask was if the Universe is indeed ludicrous. But that question each must answer for himself.

Uncle knows best. -All the Lost Boys

You discover an indescribable profundity within yourself when you realize your mortal nature.

wondered

He cut through the Twenty-First Century gallery, past the big plastic statues of Pluto and Mickey, animal-headed gods of lost America.

Nosotros contamos la verdad por cuanto en los cuentos siempre triunfa la verdad.

I very much like Kristin Cashore's books. I like Catherine Fisher's Incarceron; it may be a bit more complicated then the books I tend to love, but I liked the characters very much. I loved the Mortal Engines series by Philip Reeve; those are fantastic! Then Jonathan Stroud also; I love, love, love the Bartimaeus series. Those are so witty and so smart. I love the demon Bartimaeus and I love his footnotes; I love everything about him.

What Caul liked most about Tom was his kindness. Kindness was not valued back in Grimsby, where the older boys were encouraged to torment the younger ones, who would grow up to torment another batch of youngsters in their turn. “Good practice for life,” Uncle said. “Hard knocks, that’s all the world’s about!” But maybe Uncle had never met anyone like Tom, who was kind to other people and seemed to expect nothing more than kindness in return.

We modern civilizations have learned to recognize that we are mortal like the others. We had heard tell of whole worlds vanished, of empires foundered with all their men and all their engines, sunk to the inexplorable depths of the centuries with their gods and laws, their academies and their pure and applied sciences, their grammars, dictionaries, classics, romantics, symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics. We knew that all the apparent earth is made of ashes, and that ashes have a meaning. We perceived, through the misty bulk of history, the phantoms of huge vessels once laden with riches and learning. We could not count them. But these wrecks, after all, were no concern of ours. Elam, Nineveh, Babylon were vague and splendid names; the total ruin of these worlds, for us, meant as little as did their existence. But France, England, Russia, these names, too, are splendid. And now we see that the abyss of history is deep enough to bury all the world. We feel that a civilization is fragile as a life.

And then, with a sound not heard but sensed, a tenuous string snapped within me and I, a she now, felt the rush of gender so violent, that her head spun and I shut my eyes. And as I stood thus, with eyes closed, words came to me from every side, for along with gender she had received language.

Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito's wing that falls on the rails. Let us rise early and fast, or break fast, gently and without perturbation; let company come and let company go, let the bells ring and the children cry, -- determined to make a day of it. Why should we knock under and go with the stream? Let us not be upset and overwhelmed in that terrible rapid and whirlpool called a dinner, situated in the meridian shallows. Weather this danger and you are safe, for the rest of the way is down hill. With unrelaxed nerves, with morning vigor, sail by it, looking another way, tied to the mast like Ulysses. If the engine whistles, let it whistle till it is hoarse for its pains. If the bell rings, why should we run? We will consider what kind of music they are like. Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe, through Paris and London, through New York and Boston and Concord, through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin, having a point d'appui, below freshet and frost and fire, a place where you might found a wall or a state, or set a lamp-post safely, or perhaps a gauge, not a Nilometer, but a Realometer, that future ages might know how deep a freshet of shams and appearances had gathered from time to time. If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business. Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its thin current slides away, but eternity remains. I would drink deeper; fish in the sky, whose bottom is pebbly with stars. I cannot count one. I know not the first letter of the alphabet. I have always been regretting that I was not as wise as the day I was born. The intellect is a cleaver; it discerns and rifts its way into the secret of things. I do not wish to be any more busy with my hands than is necessary. My head is hands and feet. I feel all my best faculties concentrated in it. My instinct tells me that my head is an organ for burrowing, as some creatures use their snout and fore-paws, and with it I would mine and burrow my way through these hills. I think that the richest vein is somewhere hereabouts; so by the divining rod and thin rising vapors I judge; and here I will begin to mine.

Medicine’s focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days. For more than half a century now, we have treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns. It’s been an experiment in social engineering, putting our fates in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs.

Sooner or later something seems to call us onto a particular path. You may remember this “something” as a signal calling in childhood when an urge out of nowhere, a fascination, a peculiar turn of events struck like an annunciation: This is what I must do, this is what I’ve got to have. This is who I am…If not this vivid and sure, the call may have been more like gentle pushings in the stream in which you drifted unknowingly to a particular spot on the bank. Looking back, you sense that fate had a hand in it…. A calling may be postponed, avoided, intermittently missed. It may also possess you completely. Whatever; eventually it will out. It makes its claim…. Extraordinary people display calling most evidently. Perhaps that’s why they fascinate. Perhaps, too, they are extraordinary because their calling comes through so clearly and they are so loyal to it…. Extraordinary people bear the better witness because they show what ordinary mortals simply can’t. We seem to have less motivation and more distraction. Yet our destiny is driven by the same universal engine. Extraordinary people are not a different category; the workings of this engine in them are simply more transparent…. —JAMES HILLMAN

How long will the Gilgamesh Project – the quest for immortality – take to complete? A hundred years? Five hundred years? A thousand years? When we recall how little we knew about the human body in 1900, and how much knowledge we have gained in a single century, there is cause for optimism. Genetic engineers have recently managed to double the average life expectancy of Caenorhabditis elegans worms.12 Could they do the same for Homo sapiens? Nanotechnology experts are developing a bionic immune system composed of millions of nano-robots, who would inhabit our bodies, open blocked blood vessels, fight viruses and bacteria, eliminate cancerous cells and even reverse ageing processes.13 A few serious scholars suggest that by 2050, some humans will become a-mortal (not immortal, because they could still die of some accident, but a-mortal, meaning that in the absence of fatal trauma their lives could be extended indefinitely). Whether or not Project Gilgamesh succeeds, from a historical perspective it is fascinating to see that most late-modern religions and ideologies have already taken death and the afterlife out of the equation. Until the eighteenth century, religions considered death and its aftermath central to the meaning of life. Beginning in the eighteenth century, religions and ideologies such as liberalism, socialism and feminism lost all interest in the afterlife. What, exactly, happens to a Communist after he or she dies? What happens to a capitalist? What happens to a feminist? It is pointless to look for the answer in the writings of Marx, Adam Smith or Simone de Beauvoir. The only modern ideology that still awards death a central role is nationalism. In its more poetic and desperate moments, nationalism promises that whoever dies for the nation will for ever live in its collective memory. Yet this promise is so fuzzy that even most nationalists do not really know what to make of it. The

True, the imperfection of biological evolution’, I began, but he didn’t let me finish. ‘Imperfection?!’ he snorted. ‘Droppings! Trash! An outright botch-job! If you can’t do something right, you shouldn’t do it at all!’ ‘Not that I want to make excuses’, I said quickly, ‘but Nature, don’t forget, worked with what it had at hand. In the primordial sea …’ ‘Garbage floated!!’ he roared so loud, I winced. ‘Isn’t that right? A star exploded, planets formed, and from the dregs, which couldn’t be used for anything, from those gobbets and scraps life arose! Enough, no more! No more of these pudgy suns, inane galaxies, this mucilage that has a soul – enough!

The Roman general wanted to spare Archimedes, because he was so valuable—sort of like the Einstein of the ancient world—but some stupid Roman soldier killed him.” “There you go again,” Hazel muttered. “Stupid and Roman don’t always go together, Leo.” Frank grunted agreement. “How do you know all this, anyway?” he demanded. “Is there a Spanish tour guide around here?” “No, man,” Leo said. “You can’t be a demigod who’s into building stuff and not know about Archimedes. The guy was seriously elite. He calculated the value of pi. He did all this math stuff we still use for engineering. He invented a hydraulic screw that could move water through pipes.” Hazel scowled. “A hydraulic screw. Excuse me for not knowing about that awesome achievement.” “He also built a death ray made of mirrors that could burn enemy ships,” Leo said. “Is that awesome enough for you?” “I saw something about that on TV,” Frank admitted. “They proved it didn’t work.” “Ah, that’s just because modern mortals don’t know how to use Celestial bronze,” Leo said. “That’s the key. Archimedes also invented a massive claw that could swing on a crane and pluck enemy ships out of the water.” “Okay, that’s cool,” Frank admitted. “I love grabber-arm games.” “Well, there you go,” Leo said. “Anyway, all his inventions weren’t enough. The Romans destroyed his city. Archimedes was killed.

Leonid Gavrilov, a researcher at the University of Chicago, argues that human beings fail the way all complex systems fail: randomly and gradually. As engineers have long recognized, simple devices typically do not age. They function reliably until a critical component fails, and the whole thing dies in an instant. A windup toy, for example, works smoothly until a gear rusts or a spring breaks, and then it doesn’t work at all. But complex systems—power plants, say—have to survive and function despite having thousands of critical, potentially fragile components. Engineers therefore design these machines with multiple layers of redundancy: with backup systems, and backup systems for the backup systems. The backups may not be as efficient as the first-line components, but they allow the machine to keep going even as damage accumulates. Gavrilov argues that, within the parameters established by our genes, that’s exactly how human beings appear to work. We have an extra kidney, an extra lung, an extra gonad, extra teeth.

The problem with medicine and the institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and the old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all. Medicine’s focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet—and this is the painful paradox—we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days. For more than half a century now, we have treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns. It’s been an experiment in social engineering, putting our fates in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs. That experiment has failed. If safety and protection were all we sought in life, perhaps we could conclude differently. But because we seek a life of worth and purpose, and yet are routinely denied the conditions that might make it possible, there is no other way to see what modern society has done.

He is certainly of an age to die.’ The sadness of the old; their banishment: most of them do not think that this age has yet come for them. I too made use of this cliché, and that when I was referring to my mother. I did not understand that one might sincerely weep for a relative, a grandfather aged seventy and more. If I met a woman of fifty overcome with sadness because she had just lost her mother, I thought her neurotic: we are all mortal; at eighty you are quite old enough to be one of the dead … But it is not true. You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something. The knowledge that because of her age my mother’s life must soon come to an end did not lessen the horrible surprise: she had sarcoma. Cancer, thrombosis, pneumonia: it is as violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of the sky. ... There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

Few experiences rival a serious climb for bringing us into close contact with our own limitations. Part engineering project, part chess game, part ultramarathon, mountaineering demands of us in a way that other endeavors do not. After my trip to Cholatse, I came to think of high-altitude climbing not so much as a sport but as a kind of art or even, in its purest form, rugged spirituality—a modern version of secular asceticism that purifies the soul by stripping away worldly comfort and convenience while forcing you to stare across the threshold of mortality. It is our effort to toil through these hazardous and inhospitable landscapes that culminates with such potent effect, what humanistic psychologists have described as the attainment of self-actualization, a pinnacle of personal expression that dissolves the constraints of our ordinary lives and allows us, even if fleetingly, to “become what we are capable of becoming.” This transformative power is, in a way, why summits have taken on so much symbolic importance for those who pursue them. As the reigning mythology suggests, the higher the peak—Rainier, Cholatse, Everest—the more it fires the imagination.

He is certainly of an age to die.’ The sadness of the old; their banishment: most of them do not think that this age has yet come for them. I too made use of this cliché, and that when I was referring to my mother. I did not understand that one might sincerely weep for a relative, a grandfather aged seventy and more. If I met a woman of fifty overcome with sadness because she had just lost her mother, I thought her neurotic: we are all mortal; at eighty you are quite old enough to be one of the dead… But it is not true. You do not die from being born, nor from having lived, nor from old age. You die from something. The knowledge that because of her age my mother’s life must soon come to an end did not lessen the horrible surprise: she had sarcoma. Cancer, thrombosis, pneumonia: it is as violent and unforeseen as an engine stopping in the middle of the sky. My mother encouraged one to be optimistic when, crippled with arthritis and dying, she asserted the infinite value of each instant; but her vain tenaciousness also ripped and tore the reassuring curtain of everyday triviality. There is no such thing as a natural death: nothing that happens to a man is ever natural, since his presence calls the world into question. All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.

On the playground, “cooties” seems harmless and innocuous (unless you’ve been on the other end of that game). But sociomoral disgust can quickly scale up in intensity and become the engine behind the very worst of human atrocities. During times of social stress or chaos, those persons or populations already associated with disgust properties will provide the community a location of blame, fear, and paranoia. In short, sociomoral disgust is implicated in the creation of monsters and scapegoats, where outgroup members are demonized and selected for exclusion or elimination. As David Gilmore writes in his book Monsters, a monster is “the demonization of the ‘Other’ in the image of the monster as a political device for scapegoating those whom the rules of society deem impure or unworthy - the transgressors and deviants.” These deviants are considered to be “deformed, amoral, [and] unsocialized to the point of inhumanness.” Take, for an example, the Nazi propaganda film The Eternal Jew, where an early shot in the film showed rats emerging from a sewer juxtaposed with a crowd of Jewish persons in a Polish city. In America, as another example, proponents of anti-gay legislation have circulated pamphlets claiming that gay men eat human feces and drink human blood. In each of these instances, sociomoral disgust is used to demonize and scapegoat populations, creating “monsters” who are threatening to society.

HISTORICAL NOTE There are no nuclear power stations in Belarus. Of the functioning stations in the territory of the former USSR, the ones closest to Belarus are of the old Soviet-designed RBMK type. To the north, the Ignalinsk station, to the east, the Smolensk station, and to the south, Chernobyl. On April 26, 1986, at 1:23:58, a series of explosions destroyed the reactor in the building that housed Energy Block #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station. The catastrophe at Chernobyl became the largest technological disaster of the twentieth century. For tiny Belarus (population: 10 million), it was a national disaster. During the Second World War, the Nazis destroyed 619 Belarussian villages along with their inhabitants. As a result of Chernobyl, the country lost 485 villages and settlements. Of these, 70 have been forever buried underground. During the war, one out of every four Belarussians was killed; today, one out of every five Belarussians lives on contaminated land. This amounts to 2.1 million people, of whom 700,000 are children. Among the demographic factors responsible for the depopulation of Belarus, radiation is number one. In the Gomel and Mogilev regions, which suffered the most from Chernobyl, mortality rates exceed birth rates by 20%. As a result of the accident, 50 million Ci of radionuclides were released into the atmosphere. Seventy percent of these descended on Belarus; fully 23% of its territory is contaminated by cesium-137 radionuclides with a density of over 1 Ci/km2. Ukraine on the other hand has 4.8% of its territory contaminated, and Russia, 0.5%. The area of arable land with a density of more than 1 Ci/km2 is over 18 million hectares; 2.4 thousand hectares have been taken out of the agricultural economy. Belarus is a land of forests. But 26% of all forests and a large part of all marshes near the rivers Pripyat, Dniepr, and Sozh are considered part of the radioactive zone. As a result of the perpetual presence of small doses of radiation, the number of people with cancer, mental retardation, neurological disorders, and genetic mutations increases with each year. —“Chernobyl.” Belaruskaya entsiklopedia On April 29, 1986, instruments recorded high levels of radiation in Poland, Germany, Austria, and Romania. On April 30, in Switzerland and northern Italy. On May 1 and 2, in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and northern Greece. On May 3, in Israel, Kuwait, and Turkey. . . . Gaseous airborne particles traveled around the globe: on May 2 they were registered in Japan, on May 5 in India, on May 5 and 6 in the U.S. and Canada. It took less than a week for Chernobyl to become a problem for the entire world. —“The Consequences of the Chernobyl Accident in Belarus.” Minsk, Sakharov International College on Radioecology The fourth reactor, now known as the Cover, still holds about twenty tons of nuclear fuel in its lead-and-metal core. No one knows what is happening with it. The sarcophagus was well made, uniquely constructed, and the design engineers from St. Petersburg should probably be proud. But it was constructed in absentia, the plates were put together with the aid of robots and helicopters, and as a result there are fissures. According to some figures, there are now over 200 square meters of spaces and cracks, and radioactive particles continue to escape through them . . . Might the sarcophagus collapse? No one can answer that question, since it’s still impossible to reach many of the connections and constructions in order to see if they’re sturdy. But everyone knows that if the Cover were to collapse, the consequences would be even more dire than they were in 1986. —Ogonyok magazine, No. 17, April 1996

Katherine couldn’t have cared less about furniture or ceramics at that moment, but she felt glad that she was not the only one in London appalled by what the Lord Mayor had unleashed. She took a deep breath, then quickly explained what she and Bevis had heard in the Engineerium about MEDUSA and the next step in Crome’s great plan, the attack on the Shield-Wall. “But that’s terrible!” they whispered when she had finished. “Shan Guo is a great and ancient culture, Anti-Traction League or no Anti-Traction League. Batmunkh Gompa can’t be blown up …!” “Think of all those temples!” “Ceramics!” “Prayer-wheels …” “Silk paintings …” “F-f-furniture!” “Think of the people!” said Katherine angrily. “We must do something!” “Yes! Yes!” they agreed, and then all looked sheepishly at her. After twenty years of Crome’s rule they had no idea how to stand up to the Guild of Engineers. “But what can we do?” asked Pomeroy at last. “Tell people what is happening!” urged Katherine. “You’re Acting Head Historian. Call a meeting of the Council! Make them see how wrong it is!” Pomeroy shook his head. “They won’t listen, Miss Valentine. You heard the cheering last night.” “But that was only because Panzerstadt-Bayreuth had been going to eat us! When they learn that Crome plans to turn his weapon on yet another city …” “They’ll just cheer all the louder,” sighed Pomeroy. “He has packed the other Guilds with his allies, anyway,” observed Dr. Karuna. “All the great old Guildsmen are gone; dead or retired or arrested on his orders. Even our own apprentices are as besotted with old-tech as the Engineers, especially since Crome foisted his man Valentine on us as Head Historian…. Oh, I mean no offense, Miss Katherine….” “Father isn’t Crome’s man,” said Katherine angrily. “I’m sure he’s not! If he knew what Crome was planning he would never have helped him. That’s probably why he was packed off on this reconnaissance mission, to get him out of the way. When he gets home and finds out he’ll do something to stop it. You see, it was he who found MEDUSA in the first place. He would be horrified to think of it killing

She spoke so passionately that some of the Historians believed her, even the ones like Dr. Karuna who had been passed over for promotion when Crome put Valentine in charge of their Guild. As for Bevis Pod, he watched her with shining eyes, filled with a feeling that he couldn’t even name; something that they had never taught him about in the Learning Labs. It made him shiver all over. Pomeroy was the first to speak. “I hope you’re right, Miss Valentine,” he said. “Because he is the only man who can hope to challenge the Lord Mayor. We must wait for his return.” “But …” “In the meantime, we have agreed to keep Mr. Pod safe, here at the Museum. He can sleep up in the old Transport Gallery, and help Dr. Nancarrow catalogue the art collection, and if the Engineers come hunting for him we’ll find a hiding place. It isn’t much of a blow against Crome, I know. But please understand, Katherine: We are old, and frightened, and there really is nothing more that we can do.” The world was changing. That was nothing new, of course; the first thing an Apprentice Historian learned was that the world was always changing, but now it was changing so fast that you could actually see it happening. Looking down from the flight deck of the Jenny Haniver, Tom saw the wide plains of the eastern Hunting Ground speckled with speeding towns, spurred into flight by whatever it was that had bruised the northern sky, heading away from it as fast as their tracks or wheels could carry them, too preoccupied to try and catch one another. “MEDUSA,” he heard Miss Fang whisper to herself, staring toward the far-off, flame-flecked smoke. “What is a MEDUSA?” asked Hester. “You know something, don’t you? About what my mum and dad were killed for?” “I’m afraid not,” the aviatrix replied. “I wish I did. But I heard the name once. Six years ago another League agent managed to get into London, posing as a crewman on a licensed airship. He had heard something that must have intrigued him, but we never learned what it was. The League had only one message from him, just two words: Beware MEDUSA. The Engineers caught him and killed him.” “How do you know?” asked Tom. “Because they sent us back his head,” said Miss Fang. “Cash on Delivery.” That evening she set the Jenny Haniver down on one of the fleeing towns, a respectable four-decker called Peripatetiapolis that was steering south to lair in the mountains beyond the Sea of Khazak. At the air-harbor there they heard more news of what had happened to Panzerstadt-Bayreuth. “I saw it!” said an aviator. “I was a hundred miles away, but I still saw it. A tongue of fire, reaching out from London’s Top Tier and bringing death to everything

Amazing.” Anders glanced around with a start. He found Lucian leaning against the door frame, eyeing him with amusement. “What?” he asked, sitting up straight. “How everything can change so swiftly,” Lucian said dryly, moving into the kitchen. Anders watched him get a glass out of the cupboard before asking mildly, “And what is it you think is changing?” “Three days ago when you first realized you couldn’t read her and that she might possibly be your life mate, you weren’t happy,” Lucian said. He filled the glass with water, took a drink, and then continued, “You didn’t like the idea of anyone stealing so much of your attention, of having something to lose, of becoming a mother hen like me, or of being led around by your dick. Now you want to follow that presently very evident dick upstairs and claim Valerie by any means necessary.” Anders glanced down to note that not only did he still have an erection, but it was very evident in his boxers. Grabbing one of the couch pillows, he dragged it over his lap and muttered, “You caught all that from reading my thoughts, did you?” “Clear as glass,” Lucian said. “Right.” Anders said and grimaced at the knowledge that Lucian had read his less than complimentary thoughts about his worry for Leigh and being led around by his dick. Raising an eyebrow, he asked, “Do I owe you an apology?” “Nope. I can hardly complain when I was eavesdropping on your thoughts.” He took another drink of his water. As Lucian lowered the glass, he swallowed, and added, “But I’d go softly with Valerie. I wouldn’t want you to rush things and blow it.” “Thanks for the advice,” Anders said dryly. “I’m serious,” Lucian said softly. Anders stilled. As a rule, Lucian could be counted on to growl, grunt, or bark. His voice only got that soft, solemn sound on very rare occasions. When it did, you were smart to listen. Anders nodded. “I’m listening.” “She just experienced a nightmarish two weeks at the hands of what she thinks is a vampire. One of our kind,” he pointed out. “Ten days and nights in the flesh and three in fever-driven nightmares.” “But we aren’t vampires,” Anders pointed out. “We’re immortals.” “Semantics,” Lucian said with a shrug. “It won’t make any difference to her whether we are the mythological cursed and soulless beast Stoker wrote about, or scientifically evolved mortals turned nearly immortal by bio-engineered nanos that were introduced into our blood before the fall of Atlantis.” “Scientifically evolved mortals who need more blood than the human body can produce to power those nanos,” Anders added wearily. Lucian nodded. “We have fangs, we don’t age, we are hard to kill and we need blood to survive. To her and many others, we are vampires.” “We drink bagged blood to survive now,” Anders argued. “The immortal who kidnapped and held Valerie and the other women is a rogue.” “True,” Lucian agreed. “Unfortunately, Valerie’s first encounter with our kind was via that rogue. She, understandably, is not going to be very receptive to the possibility that there are good guys among our kind. She needs to get to know and trust us, you especially, before you reveal too much.” Anders nodded, seeing the wisdom in what he said. Then he cleared his throat and asked, “By don’t reveal too much, you aren’t including—” “No,” Lucian said, rare amusement curving his lips. “Bed her all you want, just keep your mouth shut while you do. At least until you think she can handle it. Otherwise,” he warned, “you could lose the chance of a lifetime.

Han log blekt, som om han egentligen aldrig sett något le men hade läst en bok om hur man gjorde.

Detritus, miss Valentine", sade Nimmo med ett stolt tonfall, "Flytande avfall. Utstötningsprodukter. Mänskliga näringsrester". "Menar ni ... bajs?" sade Katherine förskräckt. "Tack, miss Valentine. Ja, kanske är det ordet jag söker". Nimmo glodde hätskt på henne. "Men det finns inget äckligt med det, kan jag försäkra er. Vi ... hm ... använder alla toaletten ibland. Och ja, nu vet ni vart ert ... hm ... bajs tar vägen.

Som i det gamla ordspråket: 'På en rullande stad växer ingen mossa ...

Hon är själv fånge i sitt eget fängelse.

Ni känner väl till släkten Pennyroyals motto: 'När det hettar till gömmer sig förståndigt folk under stora möbler'?

I don’t think it’s an accident that 7NC Luxury Cruises appeal mostly to older people. I don’t mean decrepitly old, but I mean like age-50+ people, for whom their own mortality is something more than an abstraction. Most of the exposed bodies to be seen all over the daytime Nadir were in various stages of disintegration. And the ocean itself (which I found to be salty as hell, like sore-throat-soothing-gargle-grade salty, its spray so corrosive that one temple-hinge of my glasses is probably going to have to be replaced) turns out to be basically one enormous engine of decay. Seawater corrodes vessels with amazing speed—rusts them, exfoliates paint, strips varnish, dulls shine, coats ships’ hulls with barnacles and kelp-clumps and a vague ubiquitous nautical snot that seems like death incarnate.

laws of dynamic motion seem to contradict the randomness generally attributed to collisions between atoms. The ancient philosophers had already pointed out that any natural process can be interpreted in many different ways in terms of the motion of and collisions between atoms. This was not a problem for the atomists, since their main aim was to describe a godless, law less world in which man is free and can expect to receive neither punishment nor reward from any divine or natural order. But classical science was a science of engineers and astronomers, a science of action and prediction. Speculations based on hypothetical atoms could not satisfy its needs. In contrast, Newton’s law provided a means of predicting and manipulating. Nature thus becomes law-abiding, docile, and predictable, instead of being chaotic, unruly, and stochastic. But what is the connection between the mortal, unstable world in which atoms unceasingly combine and separate, and the immutable world of dynamics governed by Newton’s law, a single mathematical formula corresponding to an eternal truth unfolding toward a tautological future?

I look at her sometimes and almost wish I hadn't shot her mum

Who cares if people are dying of heatstroke down and then the Nether Burrows

His eyebrows clematis craggy forehead like mountaineering caterpillars.

Sorry about the blood.

You can't expect them to wear a big sandwich board with spy on it or a special spying hat.

For more than half a century now, we have treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns. It's been and experiment in social engineering, putting our fate in the hands of people valued more for their technical prowess than for their understanding of human needs. That experiment has failed... we seek a life of worth and purpose, yet are routinely denied the conditions that might make it possible, there is no other way to see what modern society has done.

I love windswept Scottish beaches at dusk more passionately than anything I can ever remember encountering on social media. But only the latter is engineered to constantly adapt to my interests and push my psychological buttons, so as to keep my attention captive. No wonder the rest of reality sometimes seems unable to compete.

People are stealing nuts and bolts out of rail plates, Miss Taggart, stealing them at night, and our stock is running out, the division storehouse is bare, what are we to do, Miss Taggart?” But a super-color-four-foot-screen television set was being erected for tourists in a People’s Park in Washington—and a super-cyclotron for the study of cosmic rays was being erected at the State Science Institute, to be completed in ten years. “The trouble with our modern world,” Dr. Robert Stadler said over the radio, at the ceremonies launching the construction of the cyclotron, “is that too many people think too much. It is the cause of all our current fears and doubts. An enlightened citizenry should abandon the superstitious worship of logic and the outmoded reliance on reason. Just as laymen leave medicine to doctors and electronics to engineers, so people who are not qualified to think should leave all thinking to the experts and have faith in the experts’ higher authority. Only experts are able to understand the discoveries of modern science, which have proved that thought is an illusion and that the mind is a myth.” “This age of misery is God’s punishment to man for the sin of relying on his mind!” snarled the triumphant voices of mystics of every sect and sort, on street corners, in rain-soaked tents, in crumbling temples. “This world ordeal is the result of man’s attempt to live by reason! This is where thinking, logic and science have brought you! And there’s to be no salvation until men realize that their mortal mind is impotent to solve their problems and go back to faith, faith in God, faith in a higher authority!

I'm already a monster!" she shrieked. "No, you're not!" Tom managed to heave himself to his knees. "You're my friend!" he shouted.

the Jenny Haniver was repaired. He put his hand flat on the chart table and let the steady throb of Anchorage’s engines beat against his palm, and it felt like home. In a cheap hotel behind Wolverinehampton’s air-quay Widgery Blinkoe’s five wives turned five

A comprehensive study of this foundational assertion published in 2000 in the high-gravitas journal Pediatrics by CDC and Johns Hopkins scientists concluded, after reviewing a century of medical data, that “vaccination does not account for the impressive decline in mortality from infectious diseases . . . in the 20th century.”47 As noted earlier, another widely cited study, McKinlay and McKinlay—required reading in virtually every American medical school during the 1970s—found that all medical interventions including vaccines, surgeries, and antibiotics accounted for less than about 1 percent—and no more than 3.5 percent—of the dramatic mortality declines. The McKinlays presciently warned that profiteers among the medical establishment would seek to claim credit for the mortality declines for vaccines in order to justify government mandates for those pharmaceutical products.48 Seven years earlier, the world’s foremost virologist, Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Edward H. Kass, a founding member and first president of the Infectious Diseases Society of America and founding editor of the Journal of Infectious Diseases, rebuked his virology colleagues for trying to take credit for that dramatic decline, scolding them for allowing the proliferation of “half-truths . . . that medical research had stamped out the great killers of the past—tuberculosis, diphtheria, pneumonia, puerperal sepsis, etc.—and that medical research and our superior system of medical care were major factors extending life expectancy.”49 Kass recognized that the real heroes of public health were not the medical profession, but rather the engineers who brought us sewage treatment plants, railroads, roads, and highways for transporting food, electric refrigerators, and chlorinated water.50

I think of this feeling sometimes – and I can imagine that sort of letting go: warm, dangerous, seductive. What if this is what death is: The engine beneath you steady; those that hold you strong; the sun warm? I think maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to fall into that, to loosen the grip at the waist, let gravity and fate take over – like a thought so good you can’t stop having it

We’ll be all right!” she said. “We’ll be all right now! Let’s go up and find out whom we’ve hitched a lift with!

It struck her as odd and faintly sinister, this lonely city creeping north in silence.

They were beautiful all right, but it was a huge, inhuman beauty...

The machine, mon ami, wears or. One cannot, alas, install the new engine and continue to run as before like a motor car.

I love windswept Scottish beaches at dusk more passionately than anything I can ever remember encountering on social media. But only the latter is engineered to constantly adapt to my interests and push my psychological buttons, so as to keep my attention captive. No wonder the rest of reality sometimes seems unable to compete. At

Among the maniacs things were more cheerful, a group of them sat by iron beds, playing on the springs like harps and singing in chorus; “We ain’t got no ma or pa, ’cause we is au-tom-a-ta,” also “Ro, ro, ro your bot, gently down the stream,” and so forth.

The Industrial Revolution is usually attributed to the invention of the steam engine; but as Mumford shows in his 1934 magnum opus, Technics and Civilization, it also probably couldn’t have happened without the clock. By the late 1700s, rural peasants were streaming into English cities, taking jobs in mills and factories, each of which required the coordination of hundreds of people, working fixed hours, often six days a week, to keep the machines running.

As an engine of war, I hadn’t been designed to ponder mortality—only enforce it.

Ghosts are mere memories of lives passed, granted a reassuring afterlife, manifested by the pleading, grasping, fearful imagination of our own mortality.

The powers reserved by the gods were already appropriated by man. Prometheus might have done us all a solid by stealing fire and giving it to mortals, but we don’t have a casting call out for other traitorous gods. We’re not begging Athena to steal us the secrets of precision artillery strikes, nor Hermes to grant us the secrets behind engines with increased horsepower. Prometheus stole us fire, but we took the rest ourselves.

Society does not want a man to live with a live flower inside him but to harden like mineral and live the life of a wheel. Yes, above all, the un-mortal, collective, prefabricated mechanism of society abhors the incalculable, the unique individual element, the unharnessed creative element, the flower which is apt to burst into flame and turn life into a blazing poem instead of an engineer’s workshop. That flower at all costs it is determined to cut down stone dead. 'The Case of Bill Williams', Horizon article, 1944

Abhijit The Useless (A Sonnet) At school I didn't even know the term neuroscience, Yet today I'm a symbol of neuroscience and psychology. As a kid I never even dreamed of becoming a scientist, I just wanted to observe the underpinnings of reality. After high school I failed my medical entrance exam, Yet to the world I am a vessel of ethics in medicine. I chose CS Engineering instead but soon dropped out, Yet today I am the epitome of responsible engineering. Failure and success are eternally entangled, Masses fear them while legends feast on failure. I never felt the urge for academic validation, Yet today I'm regularly cited in Springer. I never studied science in the pursuit of grades, I accidentally became a scientist by doing science. Grades and degrees are shortcut to social validation, But when you are a pioneer pushing the frontiers, all mortal validation turns null and void.

Our mortality, ironically, is a life coach. Before you die, you might as well live a happy life. So let’s learn how to find happiness despite death—or even because of death.

A notorious broadcast occurred on St. Patrick’s Day, March 17, 1949, when an attempt was made to do a remote from the Shamrock Hotel in Houston. As Taylor recalled, reservations were oversold, and when the doors opened, some 1,600 people “were in near-mortal combat for the possession of 1,000 seats.” The bedlam extended to the booth and became critical when guests began shortcutting across the soundstage. Again, from Taylor’s recollection: “One hefty matron grabbed a microphone and, before I could intervene, announced, ‘I don’t give a goddamn about your broadcast—I want my dinnertable seat!’” In a moment of despair, an NBC engineer uttered the most-dreaded four-letter expletive, which was carried coast-to-coast before the show was cut off the air. A transcription survives at SPERDVAC, the radio historical society of Southern California.

Alternatively, we have the “Beast” of Revelation 11–17, who ascends from the Abyss, has a mortal head wound that is healed (“making the world wonder” after him); speaking blasphemies against God;

Jag har aldrig varit förtjust i småbarn. Ruggiga små bestar som läcker i båda ändarna, och inte har de någon respekt för lergods heller.

Ni ska bli en del av historien, eftersom historia är allt ni bryr er om.

Livet är rörelse.

Aerymouse

Not so hellfire unpoetical as all that, brother,' said Jack. 'Rowan came out with as fine a thing as ever I heard only this very morning, just before we rigged church. He and the second mate were looking at the six-pounders and he said "Oh ye mortal engines, whose rude throats/Th'im-mortal Jove's dread clamours counterfeit." ' 'Capital, capital. I doubt if Shakespeare could have done much better,' said Stephen, nodding gravely. Of late he had noticed a very vicious tendency in these two young men, a tendency to indulge in bare-faced theft, each confident that the other's reading scarcely went beyond Robinson's Elements of Navigation.

You have to take the long view, Tom. It isn't only Traction Cities which poison the air and tear up the earth. All cities do that, static or mobile. It's human beings that are the problem. Everything that they do pollutes and destroys.

How should I remember the child's name? It was fifteen, sixteen years ago and I have never liked babies; nasty creatures, leak at both ends and have no respect for ceramics.

El cosmos es infinito y sin fronteras, y tampoco tiene límites su odio, y cada día, cada hora, puede alcanzarnos