Remember, constantly, that when you talk about 'tense of a subjunctive,' you're not talking about time. You're slipping through degrees of reality. - C. J. Cherryh

He watched the desert slip under the airship's nose, and the land roughened into highlands over which he had traveled at great cost, in great pain - dreamlike, such speed, looking down on a world where time moved more slowly, where realities were different and immediate and he had learned for a time to live.

Before is the only time you own, the only before you can trust is now, and you don’t even know how long before is.

Brains and sex fight each other to control your life, and thank God brains get a head start before sex comes along.