“I sold my soul for knowledge of the future, only to have that very pact render me forever ignorant (Gerald Tarrant).”

“What is a child?" he asks her.The diamond gaze does not flinch. "Creatures that are sold on the street by their parents, to get the coin to make more children." She paused. "Adults sell themselves.”

“Look," she told me. "A good kreda is very hard to find. I invested a lot of time and memory in you. I had no intention of giving all that up, just because you were going to be in a bad mood for a decade or two.”

“All about us were people. Perhaps a hundred. Men. Experience had taught me that humans were cruelest when segregated by sex, and the cold feeling in the pit of my stomach became led. What had I let myself in for?”

“Only in summer-phase is it carnivorous.” If there was an award for understatement, I thought, the Tyr would trounce all competition.”

“My identity is without root.”

“The Tyr had tried. It had really tried. It must have gone over every element of human psychology, tried desperately to understand the nature of human aesthetic sense … and then failed, miserably, in every regard.”