“In the beginning was the Word.In the end . . . past honor, past life, past caring . . .In the end will be the Word.”

“... you "met" this Moneta ... or whatever her real name is ... in her past but your future ... in a meeting that's still to come”

“The past is dead and buried. But I know now that buried things have a way of rising to the surface when one least expects them to.”

“Francis Crozier believes in nothing. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. It has no plan, no point, no hidden mysteries that make up for the oh-so-obvious miseries and banalities. Nothing he has learned in the past six months has persuaded him otherwise.Has it?”

“I will not try to describe the beauty of life in a Swarm ‒ their zero-gravity globe cities and comet farms and thrust clusters, their micro-orbital forests and migrating rivers and the ten thousand colors and textures of life at Rendezvous Week. Suffice it to say that I believe the Ousters have done what Web humanity has not in the past millennia: evolved.While we live in our derivative cultures, pale reflections of Old Earth life, the Ousters have explored new dimensions of aesthetics and ethics and biosciences and art and all the things that must change and grow to reflect the human soul.”

“In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.”

“He was, in other words, a careful man with careless impulses.”