“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...”

“Love never dies a natural death. It dies because we don't know how to replenish its source. It dies of blindness and errors and betrayals. It dies of illness and wounds; it dies of weariness, of wi...”

“My dear,Find what you love and let it kill you.Let it drain you of your all. Let it cling onto your back and weigh you down into eventual nothingness.Let it kill you and let it devour your remains....”

“If you gave someone your heart and they died, did they take it with them? Did you spend the rest of forever with a hole inside you that couldn't be filled?”

“I've been making a list of the things they don't teach you at school. They don't teach you how to love somebody. They don't teach you how to be famous. They don't teach you how to be rich or how to...”

“[C]oncepts of dying in to a heaven or hell seem a good deal more political than spiritual. (124)”

“I want to live the rest of my life, however long or short, with as much sweetness as I can decently manage, loving all the people I love, and doing as much as I can of the work I still have to do. ...”

“His story is simple, because simple is always best.”

“Why Worry?If its better when simpler.”

“Sounds simple, doesnt it, this notion of simplicity? Simple things done simply by a simple person. But its not as simple as it seems.”