"The Signature of All Things"

Homeland:

• Lastly, she knew one other thing, and this was the most important realization of all: she knew that the world was plainly divided into those who fought an unrelenting battle to live, and those who surrendered and died. This was a simple fact. This fact was not merely true about the lives of human beings; it was also true of every living entity on the planet, from the largest creation down to the humblest. It was even true of mosses. This fact was the very mechanism of nature—the driving force behind all existence, behind all transmutation, behind all variation—
• What’s more, Alma thought, the struggle for existence also defined the inner life of a human being. Tomorrow Morning was a pagan who had transmuted into a devout Christian—for he was cunning and self-preserving, and had seen the direction the world was taking. He had chosen the future over the past.
• The trick at every turn was to endure the test of living for as long as possible. The odds of survival were punishingly slim, for the world was naught but a school of calamity and an endless burning furnace of tribulation. But those who survived the world shaped it—even as the world, simultaneously, shaped them.
• She wrote, “All transformation appears to be motivated by desperation and emergency.” She wrote, “The beauty and variety of the natural world are merely the visible legacies of endless war.” She wrote,
• The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one’s own life before its natural end. To do so is a weakness and a pity—for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one’s eventual and inevitable demise. Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly. Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life.”
• She drew herself up to her most formidable height and, like a rauti, launched into an imposing recitation of her bloodline. “My father was Henry Whittaker, whom some in your country once called ‘The Prince of Peru.’ My paternal grandfather was the Apple Magus to His Majesty King George III of England. My maternal grandfather was Jacob van Devender, a master of ornamental aloes, and the director of these gardens for thirty-some years—a position that he inherited from his father, who, in turn, had inherited it from his father, and so forth, all the way back to the original founding of this institution in 1638.
• “Oh, Alma,” he said, and he did not bother to brush away his tears. “May God bless you, child. You have your mother’s mind.”
• But Alma cared, and the “Prudence Problem,” as she came to call it, troubled her mind considerably, for it threatened to undo her entire theory.
• they pulled Alma into their midst, and she drew comfort from this press of family. Dees had been much adored.
• even the humblest beetle—seem precious, astonishing, and “ennobled.” He asked, “What limit can be put to this power?” He wrote, “We behold the face of nature, bright with gladness . . .”
• “But Miss Whittaker,” he said, and his voice grew bright with excitement and comprehension. “This means there were three of us!” For a moment, Alma could not breathe. In an instant, she was transported back to White Acre, to a fine autumn day in 1819—the day she and Prudence first met Retta Snow. They were all so young, and the sky was blue, and love had not yet grievously injured any of them. Retta had said, looking up at Alma with her shiny, living eyes, “So now there are three of us! What luck!”
• I believe in the world of spirits, Miss Whittaker, but I would never bring the word God into a scientific discussion. After all, I am a strict atheist.”