Newdistantscenes - Drink Deep - Tumblr Blog

He removes his eye mask and smiles at the Alps below, an optical illusion making them into craters and not mountains, and then he sees the city itself.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (via wholesomeobsessive)

[O]nly Maya was tough enough to keep feeling in all of this[.]

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (via wholesomeobsessive)

“Fine, fine,” Frank snarled at the end of one of these meetings. “We’re all going to be on Mars, do we really have to fight like this over what we’re going to do there?” “That’s life,” Arkady said cheerfully. “On Mars or not, life goes on.” Frank’s jaw was clenched. “I came here to get away from this kind of thing!” Arkady shook his head. “You certainly did not! This is your life, Frank. What would you do without it?”

Red Mars - Kim Stanley Robinson (via wholesomeobsessive)

There are numerous baffling interviews - ‘I am sorry, I need the interprete, I cannot understand your American accent’ - in which dowdy matrons in lavender linen ask highly intellectual questions about Homer and Joyce, and quantum physics. Less, completely below the journalistic radar in America, and unused to substantive questions, keeps to a fiercely merry-making persona at all times, refused to wax philosophical about subjects he chose to write about precisely because he does not understand them.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (via wholesomeobsessive)

‘I say only this!’ Arkady said, staring at her bug-eyed. ‘We have come to Mars for good. We are going to make not only our homes and our food, but also our water and the very air we breathe—all on a planet that has none of these things. We can do this because we have technology to manipulate matter right down to the molecular level. This is an extraordinary ability, think of it! And yet some of us here can accept transforming the entire physical reality of this planet, without doing a single thing to change our selves, or the way we live. To be twenty-first-century scientists on Mars, in fact, but at the same time living within nineteenth-century social systems, based on seventeenth-century ideologies. It’s absurd, it’s crazy, it's—it's—it's’ he seized his head in his hands, tugged at his hair, roared ‘It’s unscientific! And so I say that among all the many things we transform on Mars, ourselves and our social reality should be among them. We must terraform not only Mars, but ourselves.’

Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1993)

His body has gone from sturdy youth to ample, august middle age. Not plump or chubby, not fat in the way Zohra proposed to grow fat, the carefree body that has at last been allowed to breathe; not happily, sexily, fuck-the-world fat. But majestically, powerfully, Pantagruelianally fat. A giant, a colossus: Carlos the Great.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (via wholesomeobsessive)

And historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can’t grasp the current situation.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (via wholesomeobsessive)

It was very painful, when you had made it quite clear to a young man that you were determined not to marry him, however much he might wish it, that he would still continue to pay you marked attentions; besides, why didn’t he always show the same attentions, if he meant them sincerely, instead of being so strange as Mr. Godfrey Cass was, sometimes behaving as if he didn’t want to speak to her, and taking no notice of her for weeks and weeks, and then, all on a sudden, almost making love again? Moreover, it was quite plain he had no real love for her, else he would not let people have that to say of him which they did say. Did he suppose that Miss Nancy Lammeter was to be won by any man, squire or no squire, who led a bad life? That was not what she had been used to see in her own father, who was the soberest and best man in that country-side, only a little hot and hasty now and then, if things were not done to the minute.

Silas Marner by George Eliot (via wholesomeobsessive)

The pastor turns out to be a tanned an miniature Groucho Marx in a cassock that buttons at one shoulder like a fast food uniform, friendly and eager, as Rupali mentioned, to kill his friend the snake. He also possesses a genius for invention adults only have in children’s books: a house with rain collectors and bamboo pipes, bringing water to a common cistern, and a way to turn food waste into cooking gas, with a hose that leads directly into his stove. And there is his three-year-old daughter, who runs around wearing nothing but a rhinestone necklace (who wouldn’t if they could?).

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (via wholesomeobsessive)

‘Hello, Arthur.  I’m here to take care of you.’ Or no, he must be dead.  He is being taken from this drab-green purgatory to a special pit they have waiting for him.  A little cottage above a flaming sea: the Artist Residency in Hell.  The face retains its smile.  And Arthur slowly, sadly, with growing acceptance of the divine comedy of his life, says the name you can by now well guess.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (via wholesomeobsessive)

‘No one has ever been hopelessly in love with me.’ 'No,’ Carlos says.  'You always gave them hope, didn’t you?’

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (via wholesomeobsessive)

But could she also have discovered his other crimes and inadequacies? How he made up ceremonies for a fifth-grade report on the religions of Iceland? How he shoplifted acne cream in high school? How he cheated on Robert so terribly? How he is a ‘bad gay’? And a bad writer? How he let Freddy Pelu walk out of his life? Shriek, shriek, shriek; it is almost Greek in its fury. A harpy sent down to punish Less at last.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (via wholesomeobsessive)

It is only the carrier of that wonderful mind, after all. A case for the crown.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (via wholesomeobsessive)

Simon watched her surreptitiously, the worry plain on his face, and suddenly she hated his doggy loyalty, his doggy love. She didn’t want anyone to care for her like that, it was an unbearable burden, an imposition.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (via wholesomeobsessive)

Simon watched her surreptitiously, the worry plain on his face, and suddenly she hated his doggy loyalty, his doggy love. She didn’t want anyone to care for her like that, it was an unbearable burden, an imposition.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (via wholesomeobsessive)

The boat ride is half an hour, during which Less sees leaping dolphins and flying fish skipping like stones over the water, as well as the floating mane of a jellyfish. He recalls an aquarium he visited as a boy, where, after enjoying a sea turtle that swam breaststroke like a dotty old aunt, he encountered a jellyfish, a pink frothing brainless negligeed monster pulsing in the water, and thought with a sob: We are not in this together.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (via wholesomeobsessive)

There’s nothing like doing the crossword with your ex-wife.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (via wholesomeobsessive)

“You should know better than that! All life support here is hooked back ultimately to Earth. But they have a number of vast military powers at their disposal, and we don’t. You and all your friends are trying to live out a fantasy rebellion, some kind of sci-fi 1776, frontiersmen throwing off the yoke of tyranny, but it isn’t like that here! The analogies are all wrong, and deceptively wrong because they mask the reality, the true nature of our dependence and their might. They keep you from seeing that it’s a fantasy!

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (via wholesomeobsessive)

Life would have been quite another matter for them both if they had learned in time that it was easier to avoid great matrimonial catastrophes than trivial everyday miseries. But if they had learned anything together, it was that wisdom comes to us when it can no longer do any good.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez (via wholesomeobsessive)

The landlord’s analogical argument was not well received by the farrier—a man intensely opposed to compromise.

Silas Marner by George Eliot (via wholesomeobsessive)

The Squire’s life was quite as idle as his sons’, but it was a fiction kept up by himself and his contemporaries in Raveloe that youth was exclusively the period of folly, and that their aged wisdom was constantly in a state of endurance mitigated by sarcasm.

Silas Marner by George Eliot (via wholesomeobsessive)

Imaginary beings, in a real landscape. No wonder he had forgotten the carrot and the stick, and wandered off into the realm of new being and radical difference and all that crap. Trying to be John Boone. Yes, it was true! He was trying to do what John had done. But John had been good at it; Frank had seen him work his magic time after time in the old days, changing everything just by the way he talked. While for Frank the words were like rocks in his mouth. Even now, when it was just what they needed.

Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson (via wholesomeobsessive)

Less appeals to the setting sun: He gave up Freddy! He gave him up willingly; he even stayed away from the wedding. He has suffered enough, all on his own; he is crippled, uniplegic, forsaken, and bereft of his magic suit. He has nothing left to take away, our gay Job. He drops to his knees in the sand.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (via wholesomeobsessive)

He was eating a quesadilla; as an areligious WASP, he had no idea what to do about death. Two thousand years of flaming Viking boats and Celtic rites and Irish wakes and Puritan worship and Unitarian hymns, and still he was left with nothing. He had somehow renounced that inheritance.

Less by Andrew Sean Greer (via wholesomeobsessive)