I started the fire, but I couldn’t control how it burnt.

do,” said the science consul. “We’ve all studied the first messages from Earth carefully. The section most worthy of attention is their history. Let’s observe the facts: Humans took more than a hundred thousand Earth years to progress from the Hunter-Gatherer Age to the Agricultural Age. To get from the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age took a

The small sliver of hope for society that had emerged in her soul had evaporated like a drop of dew in the sun.

A dazzling sunset swiftly turned to night, as though a pair of giant hands had pulled a black cloth over a world that had turned to ash.

‘All lives are equal’ is the basic tenet of Pan-Species Communism.”

It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.

“The human race is hideous. I’ve spent the first half of my life unveiling this ugliness with the scalpel of literature, but now I’m even sick of the work of dissection. I yearn for Trisolaran civilization to bring real beauty to this world.”

He felt this interminable wave was an abstract view of the universe: one end connected to the endless past, the other to the endless future, and in the middle only the ups and downs of random chance—without life, without pattern, the peaks and valleys at different heights like uneven grains of sand, the whole curve like a one-dimensional desert

After she made a home with Yang, her soul became homeless.