We contrast the urban and the natural, but that’s a contemporary myth. We’re animals, after all; our cities are organic products, fully as “natural” … - Robert Charles Wilson

Reproduction, Nerissa thought: Ethan had once called it the blade of evolution. There was no intelligence in evolution, only the cutting-board logic of selective reproduction. She envisioned the work of evolution as a kind of blind, inarticulate poetry. We are the was it Charles Darwin had said? From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved…There is grandeur in this view of life.
Grandeur or horror. The idea that all the kaleidoscopic strangeness of biological systems could unfold without guidance or motivation was almost too unsettling to accept.

The attacking piece displaces its victim. The vanquished piece leaves the plane of the board entirely. But it does not, in a higher sense, cease to exist.

Deacon Hollingshead: “The history of the world is written in Scripture, and it ends in a Kingdom.”
Julian Comstock: “The history of the world is written in sand, and it evolves as the wind blows.”