Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [849]

“That’s why I couldn’t ask anyone else to walk away from food and shelter and as much safety as there is in our world. To just start walking north, and hope you wind up some place good. How could I ask that of you?” — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 849

Note

The qualifier ‘as much safety as there is in our world’ does the whole world-building in six words — safety exists, but only as a relative quantity. And the sentence’s rhythm enacts the walking it describes: the long clause about leaving, then the infinitives trailing off north with no destination, ending on the rhetorical question that is really an answer.