Earth Quotes - page 92
Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and now it seemed to George that there was a superb fitness in the fact that the one which held it better than all others should be a railroad station. For here, as nowhere else on earth, men were brought together for a moment at the beginning or end of their innumerable journeys, here one saw their greetings and farewells, here, in a single instant, one got the entire picture of the human destiny. Men came and went, they passed and vanished, and all were moving through the moments of their lives to death, all made small tickings in the sound of time--but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof.
Thomas Wolfe
Was that, too, destined to thrive awhile and decay and vanish, and be replaced by another, Nortekku wondered? Probably. The earth changes, he thought. Mountains rise, are ground to dust, give way to plains and valleys. Shorelines are drowned; new islands are thrust upward out of the sea. Civilizations are born, die, are forgotten. The planet alone abides, and all that dwells upon it is transient.
Contemplating these things, he felt much the richer for all his freshly acquired knowledge. He felt that for the first time he comprehended, at least some small way, the great chain of existence, stretching across time from misty past to unborn future.
Robert Silverberg
... Why Nimrod? Why that name?""
Ramrod straight, he looked down at her. ""I guess you skipped Bible studies at school. Genesis 10, verses 8 to 10: 'And Cush begat Nimrod: he began to be a mighty one in the earth... And the beginning of his kingdom was Babel, and Erech, and Accad, and-""
""Babel?""
""It was only generations after the flood of Noah. Chapter 11, verse 4. 'And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven.'""
""But God struck them down when they built the tower.""
""Yes. But why? 11, 6. 'Now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.' That's what God said about mankind. He feared us, and so He struck us down. We have that verse up on the wall on big banners, to motivate the workforce. 'Nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.'""
""Wow,"" Thandie said. ""You're challenging God?""
""Why the hell not?
Stephen Baxter