“Nobody gets beyond a petroleum economy. Not while there's petroleum there.”

“In twentieth-century Old Earth, a fast food chain took dead cow meat, fried it in grease, added carcinogens, wrapped it in petroleum-based foam, and sold nine hundred billion units. Human beings. Go figure.”

“... all good things beyond sleep come precisely because we defy gravity while we live.”

“... a comment with the idle arrogance common of such nobodies who have just come into a small bit of power.”

“I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.”

“Barbarians, we call them, while all the while we timidly cling to our Web like Visigoths crouching in the ruins of Rome's faded glory and proclaim ourselves civilized.”

“Meaning no disrespect, sir, but there's no way in the Good Lord's fucking universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected.”