“Not that I haven't leaped up into the blinding light of competence now and then. It's sustaining the altitude that defeats me.”

“Never underestimate the human capacity for wishful thinking and willful blindness,' said Miles. Such as a whole society of people who became so wrapped up in avoiding death, they forgot to be alive?”

“I know girls who pine for it. They like to play dress-up and pretend being Vor ladies of old, rescued from menace by romantic Vor youths. For some reason they never play 'dying in childbirth', or 'vomiting your guts out from the red dysentery', or 'weaving till you go blind and crippled from arthritis and dye poisoning', or 'infanticide'. Well, they do die romantically of disease sometimes, but somehow it's always an illness that makes you interestingly pale and everyone sorry and doesn't involve losing bowel control.”

“When the time comes to leap in faith whether you have your eyes open or closed or scream all the way down or not makes no practical difference.”

“She rolled the mysterious plunkin across in front of the hearth and stared at it. It still looked disconcertingly like a severed head. "What do we do with this?"Dag sat cross-legged and smiled--not much of a smile, but a start. "Lots of choices. They all come down to plunkin. You can eat it raw in slices, peel it and cut it up and cook it alone or in a stew, boil it whole, wrap it in leaves and cook it in campfire coals, stick a sword through it and turn it on a spit, or, very popular, feed it to the pigs and eat the pigs. It's very sustaining. Some say you could live forever on plunkin and rainwater. Others say it would just seem like forever.”

“My dinner party,' Miles grated. 'It's just breaking up.' And sinking. All souls feared lost.”

“People give themselves to you, in their talking, and in other ways, if you are quiet and patient and let them, and not in such a damned rush to give yourself to them you go bat-blind and deaf.”