“Wow!” gasped Julia. They saw 20 or more young children of every sort lyingon the cold, bare ground.”
“Hillalum wondered what sort of people were forged by living under such conditions; did they escape madness? Did they grow accustomed to this? Would the children born under a solid sky scream if they saw the ground beneath their feet?”
“Raised by two mothers...wow, most of us barely survive one”
“If you saw two groups of children arguing over which of them could play in some waste ground, would you chose sides?”
“That was the way of this cold world, where men fished the sea and dug in the ground and died, whilst women brought forth short-lived children from beds of blood and pain.”
“The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.”