“What's one more meaningless act of violence on that zoo of a planet?It would be appropriate.When in Rome; burn it.”

“But I had made contact with a different planet from the one my parents or sister lived on. It was a planet where an act of violence changed your life.”

“Acts of violence-- Whether on a large or a small scale, the bitter paradox: the meaningfulness of death--and the meaninglessness of killing.”

“The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence humans have ever committed.”

“The sun is the hottiest planet, and it would burn you if you tried to eat it.”

“My hair would continue to gray, and then one day, it would fall out entirely, and then, on a day meaninglessly close to the present one, meaninglessly like the present one, I would disappear from the earth. And all these emotions, all these yearnings, all these data, if that helps to clinch the enormity of what I'm talking about, would be gone. And that's what immortality means. It means selfishness. My generations belief that each one of us matters more than you or anyone else would think.”