02c. 1981 ADEldest taught me about ancient religions that worshiped the sun. I never understood why- it's just a ball of light and heat. But if the sun of Sol-Earth swirls in colors and lights like that girl's hair, well, I can see why the ancients would worship that.Beth Revis / quote ↗
03c. 1981 ADElder mocked me for praying once, and i spent an hour berating him for that. He ended up throwing up his hands, laughing, and telling me i could believe whatever i wanted if i was going to hold onto my beliefs so hard.Beth Revis / quote ↗
04c. 1981 ADI wrote a book. It sucked. I wrote nine more books. They sucked, too. Meanwhile, I read every single thing I could find on publishing and writing, went to conferences, joined professional organizations, hooked up with fellow writers in critique groups, and didn’t give up. Then I wrote one more book.Beth Revis / quote ↗
06c. 1981 AD...that was before I'd started thinking about how life stuck on a ship wouldn't be so bad if Elder walked around pantless more.Beth Revis / quote ↗
07c. 1981 ADI am as silent as death. Do this: Go to your bedroom. Your nice, safe, warm bedroom that is not a glass coffin behind a morgue door. Lie down on your bed not made of ice. Stick your fingers in your ears. Do you hear that? The pulse of life from your heart, the slow in-and-out from your lungs? Even when you are silent, even when you block out all noise, your body is still a cacophony of life. Mine is not. It is the silence that drives me mad. The silence that drives the nightmares to me. Because what if I am dead? How can someone without a beating heart, without breathing lungs live like I do? I must be dead. And this is my greatest fear: After 301 years, when they pull my glass coffin from this morgue, and they let my body thaw like chicken meat on the kitchen counter, I will be just like I am now. I will spend all of eternity trapped in my dead body. There is nothing beyond this. I will be locked within myself forever. And I want to scream. I want to throw open my eyes wake up and not be alone with myself anymore, but I can't. I can't.Beth Revis / quote ↗
09c. 1981 ADShe is trying to control me with fear, because she cannot control me any other way.My eyes open wide. They burn as if they are on fire—no, as if they are made of fire. Eyes are the window to the soul.Beth Revis / quote ↗
10c. 1981 ADMy heart will never forget what it’s like to fade in and out of time, to never know if one year or a thousand have passed by, to torture yourself with the idea of your soul trapped behind ice for all eternity.I know what torture there is behind ice.Beth Revis / quote ↗
11c. 1981 ADPower isn’t control at all — power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn’t someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others that they may have the strength to stand on their own.Beth Revis / quote ↗
12c. 1981 ADOur masterpieces are Shakespeare and Jane Austen and griots and Murasaki Shikibu, but they’re also J.K. Rowling and Chuck Palahnuik and Douglas Adams and Amy Tan and Suzanne Collins and Chinua Achebe. Read. Read them all. Read the books you love, and try to read books you don’t. Read the genres you love, but sometimes also read a book outside your comfort zone. Read voraciously.Beth Revis / quote ↗
13c. 1981 ADThe glitter in the sky looks as if I could scoop it all up in my hands and let the stars swirl and touch one another but they are so distant so very far apart that they cannot feel the warmth of each other even though they are made of burning.Beth Revis / quote ↗
15c. 1981 ADIt’s all in my mind.I’m in my right mind now, and my right mind is crazy."You need to wake up, Ella."The words are a command I cannot obey.Beth Revis / quote ↗
16c. 1981 ADOr… maybe I’m not going crazy. “Maybe I’m some sort of android-cyborg-clone-thing, and I’m just breaking down.I’m not sure which way is worse.Dad laughs. “You’re not in your right mind, dear,” he says. “No, no, no, you’re not.”And then——Silence.Dad fades away. The reverie chair disappears.There’s just blackness. I remember then that I am in the reverie of something dead. Whatever that thing was, it was dead.And, just as I’m starting to wonder if, perhaps, I have died, too, I see a light, far away in the corner of the dreamscape. The light isn’t soft; it’s not glowing. It crackles like silent lightning, burning with electricity, sparks flying out and fizzling in the dark.I don’t know why—it makes no sense, the way dreams often don’t—but I want to touch the light.So I do.Beth Revis / quote ↗
17c. 1981 ADAs the dreamscape around me grows clearer, I slip further away from it. The mind is a magical thing, I’m discovering. A dreamscape is made of thought and is wider than the sky, able to grow large enough to fit not just our own world, but every possibility and impossibility beyond it. Once I quit thinking of it as being forced into the laws of physics, it’s easy to manipulate the dreamscape into anything I want. I don’t know how I know all this, no more than I understand how I know things when I dream. I just do.I throw up my hand, and a wall rises between the orange grove and me. Behind the wall, I start creating the world I need in Representative Belles’s mind.Beth Revis / quote ↗
18c. 1981 ADAnd this is what she wants to do to people. Let them have their own lives, until she wants them. Give them the strength of giants, but not the power to control it.Beth Revis / quote ↗
19c. 1981 ADAnd I know what I told my father was true: let us taste the world, and we’ll do whatever it takes to shape it into our home.Beth Revis / quote ↗
20c. 1981 ADDon’t you understand? You are Elder. When you take my role as Eldest, you must dedicate your whole life to this one idea: you are the caretaker of every single person on the ship. They are your responsibility. You can never show weakness in front of them: you are their strength. You can never let them see you in despair: you are their hope. You must always be everything to everyone on board.Beth Revis / quote ↗
22c. 1981 ADAs soon as I say the words, I know they were the right ones. My eyes dip down to Dad’s memorial plaque. Truth doesn’t lie in the heart of fortune… it’s under Triumph Towers, where the labs are.Beth Revis / quote ↗
23c. 1981 ADImages of broken light dance behind my eyelids. How could this giant lamp compare to the sun?Everything is wrong here. Shattered. Broken.Like the light.Like me.I never thought about how important the sky was until I didn’t have one.I am surrounded by walls.I have just replaced one box for another.Beth Revis / quote ↗
24c. 1981 ADI can think of nothing but the stars. It is like a piece of my soul had been lost, empty, and it is now filled with the light of a million stars. They are all that I have ever dreamed of; they are nothing that I ever expected... I will never, never be the same. I have seen stars. Real stars.Beth Revis / quote ↗
