"This is our place and our time and our life, and we should be enjoying it. But are we? Look in from outside; ask yourself... Just what are we doing?"

"We are ice and snow, we are that trapped state.

We are water falling, itinerant and vague, ever seeking the lowest level, trying to collect and connect.

We are vapour, raised against  our own devices, made nebulous, blows on whatever wind arises. 
To start again, glacial or not."

 "Who are we?
Who we are.
Just what we're taken as being. 
What we know and what we do. 
No less or more."

"Everything about us, everything around us, everything we know and can know of is composed ultimately of patterns of nothing; that's the bottom line, the final truth. So where we find we have any control over those patterns, why not make the most elegant ones, in our own terms?"

'Consider Phlebas' by Iain Banks