“For all our advances in science…we’ve always held the same obnoxious, rotten souls. Souls that have festered for millennia while science grew. 

"Maybe it’s because we could pass along science. You wrote a fact in a book and there it sat until someone born five hundred years later improved it. Refined it, implemented it more usefully. Easy. You couldn’t do that with soul learning. We all started from zero. From less than zero, actually. We started whiny, without grace. Obsessed only with our own needing. And the dead couldn’t teach us anything about that. No facts or tables or proofs. You just had to live and suffer and then teach your kids to do the same. From a distance, habit passing for happiness.” 

“An alphabet, like a life, is a finite set of shapes. With it, one can produce almost anything.”