“Small experiences, the smallest, can make a difference in a person's life. Once they've had that experience, they're changed forever.”

“You’re a teenage girl, sweetheart. Growing and changing every day. As you’re trying to find out who you are and what you want to be, you have to experiment and try different things, alter clothes, friends, personalities. I don’t think anyone so young can truly be one color just yet. And you’re my only student who’s realized that.”

“I had learned by personal experience that grumblers are deaf to any voices but their own.”

“I had once repeated the experiment to reassure myself that this was so, and it was. Ashes to ashes; starch to sugar. A little window into the Creation”

“I don't think humanity just replays history, but we are the same people our ancestors were, and our descendants are going to face a lot of the same situations we do. It's instructive to imagine how they would react, with different technologies on different worlds. That's why I write science fiction -- even though the term 'science fiction' excites disdain in certain persons.”

“That is what you're making of the end of your mother's life, child. What will you make of your own?”

“It wasn't all that different from any particularly demanding boarding school, except that of course nobody ever went home for the holidays and we had a lot of brain surgery.”