“I half closed my eyes and imagined this was the spot where everything I'd ever lost since my childhood had washed up, and I was now standing here in front of it, and if I waited long enough, a tiny...”

“That was the only time, as I stood there, looking at that strange rubbish, feeling the wind coming across those empty fields, that I started to imagine just a little fantasy thing, because this was...”

“Nos-tal-gic, Akira said, as though it were a word he had been struggling to find. Then he said a word in Japanese, perhaps the Japanese for nostalgic. Nos-tal-gic. It is good to be nos-tal-gic. Ver...”

“What I'm not sure about, is if our lives have been so different from the lives of the people we save. We all complete. Maybe none of us really understand what we've lived through, or feel we've had...”

“Poor creatures. What did we do to you? With all our schemes and plans?”

“But what is the sense in forever speculating what might have happened had such and such a moment turned out differently? One could presumably drive oneself to distraction in this way. In any case, ...”

“You need to establish a degree of privacy and solitude in order to write”

“The more I'm let alone and not worried the better I can function.”

“Technology would have long ago made privacy impossible, except that this had only made it more precious and desirable--and in the close confines of starship life, respect for another's privacy had ...”

“With a secret like that, at some point the secret itself becomes irrelevant. The fact that you kept it does not.”

“Then Cassie told her story. The feeling was like gathering up everything she's ever done or felt or known up to that moment and tying it into a ball and pitching it with all her might as far away a...”

“Every woman needs secrets,' her mother said with a smile then, her eyes meeting Sally's in the rearview mirror. 'Remember that when you're old like me, pumpkin, because the world has a way of makin...”