No matter how much you plan for it, the real thing seems curiously, well, unreal. - Gregory Benford

Engineers never liked the unexplained, whereas physicists lived for it.

He went to Los Angeles to do the work even though he hated the city; it was full of happy homogeneous people without structure or direction. While on the bus to work, it seemed to him Los Angeles went on long after it had already made its point.

Once introduced into this world, life would never leave—there was no end to the explosive, consuming, voracious lust of long chain molecules to link and match and make of themselves yet more and more and again more.