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Dellarobia studied the toy—bulky body, cord, receiver, dial—and realized it did not resemble any telephone that existed in Cordelia’s lifetime. Phones lived in people’s pockets, they slid open, they certainly had no dials.
Why would she talk into it? She doesn’t know it’s a telephone.

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Diapause,” he called it, a pause in the normal schedule of growing up, mating, and reproducing. Somewhere in midlife, the cold or darkness of winter put them all on hold, shutting down their sex drive until future notice.
Like life in an uninsulated house, she thought. Maybe like marriage in general.

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Words were just words, describing things a person could see. Even if most did not. Maybe they had to know a thing first, to see it.

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Humans are in love with the idea of our persisting,” he said. “We fetishize it, really. Our retirement funds, our genealogies. Our so-called ideas for the ages.