Alastair Reynolds (1966) British novelist and astronomer
“You’ve just described nine-tenths of human history.”
Open and Shut (p. 265)
Short fiction, Belladonna Nights and Other Stories (2021)
Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part II (1615), Book III, Ch. 6.
Alastair Reynolds (1966) British novelist and astronomer
“You’ve just described nine-tenths of human history.”
Open and Shut (p. 265)
Short fiction, Belladonna Nights and Other Stories (2021)
“Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.”
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
Miguel de Unamuno (1864–1936) 19th-20th century Spanish writer and philosopher
The Tragic Sense of Life (1913), VII : Love, Suffering, Pity
Louis L'Amour (1908–1988) Novelist, short story writer
Preface
Sackett's Land (1974)
Context: We are all of us, it has been said, the children of immigrants and foreigners — even the American Indian, although he arrived here a little earlier. What a man is and what he becomes is in part due to his heritage, and the men and women who came west did not emerge suddenly from limbo. Behind them were ancestors, families, and former lives. Yet even as the domestic cattle of Europe evolved into the wild longhorns of Texas, so the American pioneer had the characteristics of a distinctive type.
Physically and psychologically, the pioneers' need for change had begun in the old countries with their decision to migrate. In most cases their decisions were personal, ordered by no one else. Even when migration was ordered or forced, the people who survived were characterized by physical strength, the capacity to endure, and not uncommonly, a rebellious nature.
History is not made only by kings and parliaments, presidents, wars, and generals. It is the story of people, of their love, honor, faith, hope and suffering; of birth and death, of hunger, thirst and cold, of loneliness and sorrow. In writing my stories I have found myself looking back again and again to origins, to find and clearly see the ancestors of the pioneers.
Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (1796–1832) French physicist, the "father of thermodynamics" (1796–1832)
p, 125
Reflections on the Motive Power of Heat (1824)
Xenophon book Cyropaedia
Bk. 1, ch. 6; as translated by Henry Graham Dakyns in Cyropaedia (2004) p. 31.
Cyropaedia, 4th Century BC
“Without reading, we are all without light in the dark, without fire in the cold.”
Tamora Pierce (1954) American writer of fantasy novels for children
Source: Tortall and Other Lands: A Collection of Tales