“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...”

“There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments there are consequences.”

“You can't hurt me the way you think you can. But even if you could? I would rather die with the taste of you on my tongue than live and never touch you again. I'm in love with you, Mara. I love you...”

“The assumption is that if I expend myself for myself in the end all Ill be left with is myself, and that alone is frightening. But what Ive failed to consider is that I have to expend so much of my...”

“Think of it! We could have gone on longing for one another and pretending not to notice forever. This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it.”

“I see you and St. John have been quarrelling, Jane,' said Diana, 'during your walk on the moor. But go after him; he is now lingering in the passage expecting you - he will make it up.'I have not m...”

“Dignity is as essential to human life as water, food, and oxygen. The stubborn retention of it, even in the face of extreme physical hardship, can hold a man's soul in his body long past the point ...”