“When you’d lived long enough, she’d sometimes reflected, when certain habits had become ingrained no matter what refreshment of the neural pathways the immortality genes could bestow, ethics and etiquette became ever less distinct. Hitherto the involuntary equation had read one way, in disproportionate pangs of conscience over a small breach of manners. Now the terms had been inverted, and she felt over the Council majority’s horrible, criminal, potentially murderous mistake the sort of acute embarrassment that might have been appropriate for some ghastly faux pas. Dreadfully sorry, I’m such a ditz about these nuclear attack protocols…”

— Ken MacLeod , book Learning the World

Source: Learning the World (2005), Chapter 19 “A Full and Frank Exchange of Views” (p. 326)

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Ken MacLeod 25

Scottish science fiction writer 1954

Genevieve Cogman The Invisible Library

Source: The Invisible Library (2015), Chapter 13 (p. 174)

“Even though she had been warned, she tripped over the bike. She probably tripped because she'd been warned and was telling herself not to trip over the bike. She did that sometimes. It was often easier not to know what obstacles were in the way.”

Maureen Johnson (1973) writer from the USA

Source: The Last Little Blue Envelope

“When the evening was over, Anne could not be amused…nor could she help fearing, on more serious reflection, that, like many other great moralists and preachers, she had been eloquent on a point in which her own conduct would ill bear examination.”

Jane Austen book Persuasion

Source: Persuasion

“When Cassie Fowler awoke, she was less shocked to discover that an afterlife existed than to find that she, of all people, had been admitted to it. Her entire adulthood, it seemed, year after year of spiting the Almighty and saluting the Enlightenment, had come to nothing. She’d been saved, raptured, immortalized. Shit. The situation spoke badly of her and worse of eternity. What heaven worthy of the name would accept so ardent an unbeliever as she?”

James K. Morrow book Towing Jehovah

Source: Towing Jehovah (1994), Chapter 4, “Dirge” (p. 67)

“One day, she’d find a way to live her life to the fullest. She was sure of it. She just had no idea how she would manage it.”

Ilona Andrews American husband-and-wife novelist duo

Source: On the Edge

“And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?”

Edgar Allan Poe book The Tell-Tale Heart

The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)
Context: And now have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses? -- now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound too. It was the beating of the old man's heart. It increased my fury, as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage.