“I would like to be the air that inhabits you for a moment only. I would like to be that unnoticed and that necessary.”

“What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other ga...”

“In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt.”

“Nature is to zoos as God is to churches.”

“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is l...”

“Nature is an expert in cost-benefit analysis,' she says. 'Although she does her accounting a little differently. As for debts, she always collects in the long run...”

“[I]n my own case at least I feel my professional need for freedom of speech and expression prejudices me toward a government whose constitution guarantees it.”

“If their social institutions were abhorrent, their unwritten constitution bordered upon the absurd. The absolutist monarchs of the ancient kingdoms of Amara looked with detestation at the Shazarian...”

“Constitutional democracy, you see, is no romantic notion. It's our defense against ourselves, the one foe who might defeat us.”

“Hate looks like everybody else until it smiles”

“The life where nothing was ever unexpected. Or inconvenient. Or unusual. The life without colour, pain or past.”

“Homo sapiens! The name itself was an irony. They had not been wise at all, but incredibly stupid. Lords of the Earth with their great gray brains, their thinking minds had placed them above all oth...”

“If you claim to be a real friend then be real in your soul. If you claim to be fake then be an enemy instead.”

“I think that most people would rather face the light of a real enemy than the darkness of their imagined fears.”

“You don't make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavory enemies.”