It Was Very Painful, When You Had Made It Quite Clear To A Young Man That You Were Determined Not To

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)

“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)

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)

‘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)

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

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)