“No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work.”

“All of nature was a record of crisis and destruction and adaptation and flourishing and being knocked back down again. What had happened on New Terra was singular and concrete, but the pattern it w...”

“The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster.”

“A few generations living and dying without a sky, and enclosed spaces lost the atavistic terror of premature burial.”

“In the artifacts that are conscious, memories of vanished lives still flicker. Tissues that were changed without dying hold the moment that a boy heard his sister was leaving home. They hold multip...”

“He is, however, Amos continued, keeping a constant rail gun lock on the Israels reactor.Holden ran his fingers through his hair. So not too generous, then.Say pretty please, but carry a one-kilo sl...”

“The sex,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure that we were okay. That things were all right between us.”“Well,” she said, “orgasm does release a lot of oxytocin, so I’m probably more fond of you t...”

“Sex can be used either for self-affirmation or for self-transcendence either to intensify the ego and consolidate the social persona by some kind of conspicuous embarkation and heroic conquest, or...”

“He didn't know all that much about how the machinery worked anyway. Such knowledge was for specialists. In war, as in love, he was a fearless, happy-go-lucky adventurer.”

“If she did experience sex--or something close to it--in high school, I'm sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.”