“... a society devoted to self-destruction and waste but unwilling to acknowledge its indulgent ways.”

“Luckily, even as a young man not yet become himself, John Bridgens had two things besides indecision that kept him from self-destruction - books and a sense of irony.”

“I doubt if he ever confronted and acknowledged his own deeper motivations, except when they were as pure as spring water.”

“Do you think it's ready?" I [Silenus, The Poet] asked. "It's perfect... a masterpiece.""Do you think it'll sell?" I asked. "No fucking way.”

“They . . . are . . . so. . . sorry, ” she whispered. “The machine brings back no . . . pictures . . . only the food and air and water. It is programmed . . . as you suggested, Dem Lia . . . to eliminate infestations. They are . . . so . . . so . . . sorry for the loss of Ouster life. They offer the suicide of . . . of their species . . . if it would atone for the destruction.”

“I remembered Grandam telling me about an early Old Earth scientist, one Charles Darwin, who had come up with one of the early theories of evolution or gravitation or somesuch, and how—although raised a devout Christian even before the reward of the cruciform—he had become an atheist while studying a terrestrial wasp that paralyzed some large species of spider, planted its embryo, and let the spider recover and go about its business until it was time for the hatched wasp larvae to burrow its way out of the living spider’s abdomen.”

“Finding a woman like that amidst the herd of half-feeling, half-caring, half-responding, females in our society of 1860's England was not so much like finding a diamond in the rough as it was finding a warm responsive body amidst the cold dead forms on slabs in the Paris morgue that Dickens had so enjoyed taking me to.”