“Melanie thinks: when your dreams come true, your true has moved. You've already stopped being the person who had the dreams, so it feels more like a weird echo of something that already happened to...”

“Even the air seems to have a smell - earthy and rich and complicated, made out of things living nd things dying and things long dead. The smell of the world where nothing stops moving, nothing stay...”

“Every adult grew from a kid who beat the odds. But at different times, in different places, the odds have been appallingly steep.”

“And one of the reasons why he likes her is because shes so different from him. Shes as big as four-fifths of five-eighths of fuck all, but she takes no bullshit from anyone. She even talks back to ...”

“She faces him, trying to take a breath that's long and level, trying to pull all the slopping emotions back inside so he won't see them in her face.”

“In an age of rust, she comes up stainless steel”

“My romantic history since arriving on Novo has been non-existent, but I don't know what, if anything, came before; thanks to the government's cerebral pilfering.”

“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.”