Look at the pattern this seashell makes. The dappled whorl, curving inward to infinity. That's the shape of the universe itself. There's constant pressure, pushing towards pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve into ever more complex forms. It's a kind of pattern gravity, a holy greening power we call 'Viriditas' and it is the driving force in the cosmos. Life, you see.

We dream, we wake on a cold hillside, we pursue the dream again. In the beginning was the dream, and the work of disenchantment never ends.

One of the chief features of incompetence was an inability to see it in oneself.

Beauty was the promise of happiness, not happiness itself; and the anticipated world was often more rich than anything real.

Science was many things, Nadia thought, including a weapon with which to hit other scientists.

I think the US is in a terrible state of denial. Worse than that, we seem to be caught in a kind of Gotterdammerung response: we'd rather have the world go down in flames than change our lifestyle or admit we're wrong.

Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever.