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Crushed wing. Crying, in a pitch almost too high for Patricia to hear. She looked into the sparrow’s eye, enveloped by a dark stripe, and she saw its fear. Not just fear, but also misery - as if this bird knew it would die
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Okay. So you could just put me up in a tree and hope for the best, but I’ll probably get eaten or starve to death.” His head bobbed. “Or … I mean. There is one thing.” “What?”
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Do you think the occasional witch burning helps to weld society together?
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Even among humans, self-awareness has gradations.
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If you only give a little bit - of the truth, of your time, of money - then you're being sincere. Give too much, and you're probably just careless, and it means nothing.
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I don’t think a crow has ever even considered the categorical imperative.
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Palm Strike's main superpower is the stupidity of his enemies.
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Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small. It’s more that nature’s playing field is full of traps.
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You’re going to, what, just walk down to Best Buy and get a time machine off the rack?
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LAURENCE AND SERAFINA went to an organic burger place, locally sourced, etc., and Serafina talked about her emotional robots. “You won’t believe the heuristics. They recognize faces, but also they recognize each face’s habitual emotional
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There's been a greater awareness among people, especially geeks, that the laws of physics don't allow that much wiggle room in terms of things like faster-than-light travel, time travel, sending people to other planets. It's harder than we were aware a few decades ago. I think there used to be this widespread imagination, this idea that we'd eventually just hop in a rocket and go to Mars.
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Color returned to the world, cone time replaced rod time.
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All this time as a mad scientist why didn't he have a shrink ray or stun gun in his closet somewhere? He had been wasting his life.
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“No!” Patricia’s eyes flooded and she felt short of breath. “You can’t! You can’t!” And then she was running, careening, with the red bucket in one hand. She could hear her sister behind her, smashing branches.
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That she saw through this ploy did not prevent it from working perfectly.
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"You promised you would never run away from me again,” she said. “I did promise that,” he said. “And I don’t remember you promising not to destroy my life’s work. So you have me there.
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I am, as you know, a fan of nature, said Reginald. And yet, nature doesn't find ways to do anything. Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small.
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"That’s because our parents pick out our shoes,” said Patricia. “Just wait until we’re grown up. Our shoes will be insane.
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When it comes to love triangles and duels to the death, you should always cheat. - Fairy Werewolf vs. Zombie Vampire
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“I am unflappable,” Laurence told the bus driver. Who shrugged, as if he’d thought so too, once upon a time, until someone had flapped him.
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You celebrated the small victories, and you dreamed of the big ones to come.
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On the one hand, technology is more mysterious. On the other hand, we're more aware of its limitations. Every time I watch Star Trek, I'm highly aware of magical everything is: the holodeck, the warp drive. It's possible that with wormholes we might eventually be able to do something like that. But the laws of physics are pretty unforgiving.
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If Patricia closed her eyes and breathed deeply, she could imagine the people unloading wooden foil-lined crates stamped with names of cities like Marrakesh and Bombay.
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As Dorothy J. Heydt famously said, the eight deadliest words for any work of fiction are 'I don't care what happens to these people.