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A passage from Louise Erdrich’s 2005 novel The Painted Drum:
Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.
Excerpts from The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet (Wayfarers, #1) by Becky Chambers
He’d sometimes wondered if he’d go back to the Fleet to raise kids, or if he’d settle down on a colony somewhere. But he was a spacer through and through, and he had the itch for drifting. As the years went on, the thought of making a family had dwindled. The point of a family, he’d always thought, was to enjoy the experience of bringing something new into the universe, passing on your knowledge and seeing part of yourself live on. He had come to realize that his life in the sky filled that need.
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The Lovey that Jenks knew was uniquely molded by the Wayfarer. Her personality had been shaped by every experience she and the crew had together, every place they’d been, every conversation they’d shared. And honestly, Jenks thought, couldn’t the same be said for organic people? Weren’t they all born running the Basic Human Starter Platform, which was shaped and changed as they went along? In Jenks’s eyes, the only real difference in cognitive development between Humans and AIs was that of speed.
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I do think something like an antiaging tweak is done out of a lack of self-esteem, because you feel like you’re not good enough as you are.
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Humans always got a little dumb when sexual partners were involved.
...It was hard to feel weird in a place where everybody was weird. He took comfort in that....“Why snuggle with a weirdo?” Kizzy asked. “Being weird doesn’t mean that she doesn’t deserve companionship...“You were comforting her. That’s all it was. You just wanted her to know that someone cared.” “Nobody should be alone,” Sissix said. “Being alone and untouched . . . there’s no punishment worse than that. And she’s done nothing wrong. She’s just different.”...Humans’ preoccupation with “being happy” was something he had never been able to figure out. No sapient could sustain happiness all of the time, just as no one could live permanently within anger, or boredom, or grief....There is peace out here in the open. I have friends and a garden in the stars and a kitchen full of tasty things. I heal people now....I never thought of fear as something that can go away. It just is....It was funny how the potential for profit always seemed to trump antipathy....I’ve never been good with people. I’ve always preferred my lab. I like data. Data is consistent, it’s steady, it’s easy to understand. With data, you always know what the answer is. If the data doesn’t make sense, you can always puzzle it out. Unlike people....Scholars of sapient life note that all young civilizations go through similar stages of development before they are ready to leave their birth planets behind. Perhaps the most crucial stage is that of “intraspecies chaos.” This is the proving ground, the awkward adolescence when a species either learns to come together on a global scale, or dissolves into squabbling factions doomed to extinction, whether through war or ecological disasters too great to tackle divided....Mistakes mean progress.
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