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The Fireman
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The hens are clucking. Harper thought it would be a toss-up, which term for women she hated more: bitch or hen. A hen was something you kept in a cage, and her sole worth was in her eggs. A bitch, at least, had teeth.
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Amy
“I remember, when I was a kid, staring at road maps, the kind you bought at gas stations and carried in the glove box, and that were, for me at least, impossible to properly refold. I remember looking at all those intersecting lines representing roads laid over and carved through the earth, dirt tracks and superhighways, the insolent grids of the cities. I wanted to follow them all to the end. I remember thinking that if you could get hold of all the maps for the entire country, or even the hemisphere, and spread them out side by side, it would be obvious that every road leads to every other road, that everything is connected. The dull suburban lane on which I lived would carry me eventually to rocky paths in Patagonia and the rutted logging roads that cross Alaska. There were dead ends, of course, lots of them, but assuming you were free to backtrack, it was impossible, really, to get lost. You could follow any road in any direction and eventually, by however circuitous a path, get where you needed to go. Oceans notwithstanding. I don’t remember talking to anyone about this. As a child you learn to guard your thoughts, to hold close to ideas that seemed simple and self-evident and that you knew adults would scoff at. What counted as education seemed to mainly involve learning to walk in single file and otherwise keep quiet. School meant grown-ups telling you that things had to be done in a certain way, and in no other, that however many obvious and inviting paths might lead from one point to another, only one of them was right. The rest might as well not exist at all. To do well, to earn praise, you had to learn not to see them anymore.”
― Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
― Desert Notebooks: A Road Map for the End of Time
“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single crow in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a Cheeto®.”
― Feral Creatures
― Feral Creatures
“An act so absolute as that of killing involves not only the killer but, as well, those who have formed him. In murdering a man I was making them murderers.”
― Dawn
― Dawn
“For it was their world, not Man’s. However he might shape it for his own purposes, it would be his duty always to safeguard the interests of its rightful owners. No one could tell what part they might have to play in the history of the universe. And when, as was one day inevitable, Man himself came to the notice of yet higher races, he might well be judged by his behaviour here on Mars.”
― The Sands of Mars
― The Sands of Mars
“How are we ever to disarm evil and abolish death as a means to an end? How are we ever to break the cycle of violence and rage? Can terror coexist with justice? Does murder call for murder, despair for revenge? Can hate engender anything but hate?”
― Dawn
― Dawn
Read by Theme
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Want to join a reading group, but worry that the group will choose a book that utterly bores you? Here's an alternative designed to give you a bit mor ...more
Want to join a reading group, but worry that the group will choose a book that utterly bores you? Here's an alternative designed to give you a bit mor ...more
Second Chance Challenges
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— last activity Sep 16, 2024 01:38PM
A place for all of those challenges you missed or weren't able to complete in your favorite challenge groups. ...more
A place for all of those challenges you missed or weren't able to complete in your favorite challenge groups. ...more
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