“Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all hed ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were ...”

“Part of his mind was screaming, but it was a distant one and easy to ignore.”

“War without end. Well, what was history without that? And how would having the stars change anything?”

“Nothing lasted forever. Not peace. Not war. Nothing.”

“The messages coming back flooded the comm buffers with rage and sorrow, threats of vengeance and offers of aid. Those last were the hardest. New colonies still trying to force their way into local ...”

“Because we can't just blow up enough things that this becomes a good situation.”

“When you expect the world to end at any moment, you know there is no need to hurry. You take your time, you do your work well.”

“If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligentl...”

“I like living in my head because in there, everyone is kind and innocent. Once you start integrating yourself into the world, you realize that people are nasty, mean creatures. They're worse than z...”

“It was like waking from a nightmare to a worse nightmare.”

“Advances in the technology of telecommunications have proved an unambiguous threat to totalitarian regimes everywhere.”