“It's just one thing after another. Cars that won't run. Planes that will never fly again. Computer systems we can barely use, let alone re-create. It's like...time is flowing backward. We're caveman archeologists in the ruins of the future.”

“There are some things more important than ourselves - more important than the limits of the present, and the whims of the now. There is a future to build and protect. And if we're going to make that future as reality, we have to stop fighting among ourselves. We have to end dissent whenever we find it. We have to trust one another again.”

“We're not talking about pitching in, we're talking about institutionalized rape. We're talking about the government taking full control over your body--what it's for, what you do with it, and what other people can do to it. I'm not letting some horny old dude screw me just because the law says I have to. - Xochi”

“None of this is by accident, and we have to figure out what it all means. She paused. We have to. It's the same old argument I used to have with Mkele: the present or the future. Sometimes you have to put the present through hell to get the future you want.”

“It's not enough, is it? Just to follow; just to have faith in someone bigger and smarter and better informed. That's how we're built, that's how every Partial is wired - to follow orders and trust in our leaders - but it's not enough. It never has been. We've followed our leaders, and sometimes they win and sometimes they lose; we do what they say and we play our part. But this is our decision. Our mission. And when we're done, it will be our victory, or our defeat. I don't want to fail, but if I do, I want to be able to look back and say, 'I did that. I failed. That was all me.”

“Happiness is the most natural thing in the world when you have it, and the slowest, strangest, most impossible thing when you don't. It's like learning a foreign language: You can think about the words all you want, but you'll never be able to speak it until you suck up your courage and say them out loud.”

“Fear is a ... it's a weird thing, when you think about it. People are only afraid of other things, they're never afraid of themselves.”