“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...”

“Let me nurture my wings, for I was born to fly.”

“But how do you wait for heavenAnd who has that much timeAnd how do you keep your feet on the groundWhen you know, that you were born, you were born to fly”

“I’m a long-flight pilot. Pushing a little bubble of air-filled metal across an ocean of nothing is what I was born to do.”

“Of the two powers, the two categories that take possession of us when we enter the world, space is by far the less mysterious. . . . Space is, after all, solid, monolithic. . . . Time, on the other...”

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary master...”

“A human being is a part of the whole, called by us "Universe", a part limited in time and space.”