The Long Cosmos
by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter
(London, Corgi Books, 2016)
He was a man who had always sought to be alone, for big chunks of his life at least.
Time just pours away, doesn't it?
Page 30.
What use were nuns and counsellors and teachers if they couldn't show patience at least?
Page 33.
A kid was a kid, after all, not a bundle of conditions.
Page 39.
Most long-lived space stations got shabby; they' weren't places where you could ever open the windows for a good spring-clean.
Page 62.
The overwhelmingly most likely location of high intelligence is towards the centre of the Galaxy. The spiral arms, where we live, are waves of star birth washing around the galactic disc. But at the core, where the stars are crowded close, where the energy fluxes are enormous - a dangerous place, but where the first worlds rich in rock and metal formed billions of years before Earth - that is where the peak of galactic civilization must reside.
Page 66.
No technology is dangerous if handled correctly.
Page 69.
A landscape without its big predators is unbalanced - a pathology.
Page 101.
The more of the picture you got, the more you were going to get.
Page 136.
Maybe multi-species cooperation and cohabitation were actually the norm n the Long Earth.
Page 156.
Humans had come t believe that ruthless competition, even the extermination of rivals, were inevitable.
Pages 156-157.
What better medium to send a message than coded into stories, passed by word of mouth from ne human being to another?
Pages 202-203.
To realize one’s true nature is a liberation.
Page 217.
Human culture was stored in artefacts, books, tools, buildings, a whole heap of inventions and discoveries passed down from the past, there for each new generation to access.
Page 226.
Predators evolved to exploit the weaknesses of their prey, ad one stratagem was to lie, to deceive the credulous. Thus carnivorous flowers lured insects into their lethal maws with colourful but mendacious promises of nectar.
Page 247.
Things go wrong when you grow too fast.
Page 378.
Extinctions can be a spur to evolution.
Page 419.
Home: not the place you were born into, but the place that gathered you in.
Page 427.
Lacking any better evidence, one must assume that the place one visits is typical of the world as a whole.
Page 433.
In the course of the Galaxy’s history there has been a great wave of starmaking, washing out from the centre. So the closer you get to the centre, the older the worlds and the suns are.
Page 434.