Just finished The Dark Forest by Cixin Liu. A couple passages of varying lengths

SPOILER: Click to show

For father and son, the silence conveyed more information than words. Growing up, his father had used silence rather than speech to educate him, and words were merely the punctuation between the silences.

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As the elderly passed away, the departed Golden Shore vanished into the smoke of history. The ship of human civilization floated alone in the vast ocean, surrounded on all sides by endless, sinister waves, and no one knew if there was even an opposite shore.

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The universe had once been bright, too. For a short time after the big bang, all matter existed in the form of light, and only after the universe turned to burnt ash did the heavier elements precipitate out of the darkness and form planets and life. Darkness was the mother of life and civilization.

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Every civilization is an armed hunter stalking through the trees like a ghost, gently pushing aside branches that block the path and trying to tread without sound. Even breathing is done with care. The hunter has to be careful, because everywhere in the forest are stealthy hunters like him. If he finds other life—another hunter, an angel or a demon, a delicate infant or a tottering old man, a fairy or a demigod—there’s only one thing he can do: open fire and eliminate them. In this forest, hell is other people. An eternal threat that any life that exposes its own existence will be swiftly wiped out.

“What if I sold my soul to the devil when I was a kid?”

“You didn’t sell your soul to the devil.”

“What if I did but I don’t remember it?”

“You didn’t sell your soul to the devil.”

“But what if I did?”

“Okay, but think, Henry, what did you get for it?”

—

Made me chuckle. From Weather by Jenny Offill.

Just finished two books back to back. Both are from The Dandelion Dynasty trilogy, last of which is sadly not out yet. Some figures of speech that I really enjoyed...


The Grace of Kings by Ken Liu

SPOILER: Click to show

Gone was the handsome, arrogant, fearless man who had made ten thousand wives into widows and forged the crowns of the Seven States into one. His body had been usurped by an old man, consumed by fear of death.

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Men and women were the zyndari letters and punctuation marks of this grand epic that the gods composed on the fly, changing their fickle minds from one moment to the next... Just as the wax clumps that refused to be shaped properly would be scraped away by the writer, to be replaced by new, pliant wax, so would men who resisted the fates be swept away, to be replaced by those sensitive to the shifts of fortune.

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She wore the title of princess like a sentimental cloak, too shabby to keep her warm, but too dear to shed.

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It was men like him who had made her into a symbol, had put her into this impossible position. But, in a way, that made the task easy. She knew exactly what to say or do, and she even enjoyed the challenge of playing the role of his ideal: She was worthy only insofar as she oriented herself to men, like a sunflower adoring the sun.

The Wall of Storms, naturally also by Ken Liu

SPOILER: Click to show

It was as impossible to recall the words of her mother accurately as it was to hold on to the sand slipping between the fingers of a squeezing fist. But the hearts of the tales remained, and the scent of home lingered in those memories. They were the landscape of her childhood dreams, the shores of her first narratives.

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After a man had been drenched by one wave of grief, sometimes he was numb to far greater waves.

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“The Islands of Dara shelter the Tan Adü now like lips shielding teeth from a wintry blast. But if the lips are gone, will the teeth not feel the chill?”

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“The ocean in the north was a pale blue canvas upon which were inscribed a masterpiece of complex patterns: long, flowing arcs like the tentacles of the octopus; intricate curlicues like the swirl of the nautilus; bold, thick strokes of starburst passion that demonstrates the brush painter’s skill and soul. The canvas was tinctures in deep aquamarine and pastel periwinkle, purplish black and sun-pale white—it was a painting the likes of which I had never seen, an abstract seascape drawn by the gods.”