“So that's it?" asked the expendable."Final decision," said Ram. "And it's the right one.""Why do you think so?""Because we live or die, we'll learn something important from jumping into the fold. Thousands of future travelers will either follow us or not. But if we don't make the jump, we'll learn nothing, have no new options.""A lovely speech. It has been sent back to Earth. It will inspire millions.""Shut up," said Ram.”

“Whoop-de-do," said Ram."What?""I'm celebrating.""Was that irony or loss of mental function?" asked the expendable."Was that a rhetorical questions, a bit of humor, or a sign that you are losing confidence in me?""I have no confidence in you, Ram," said the expendable."Well, thanks.""You're welcome.”

“And when we diverge, it will be impossible for the expendables and the ship's computers on all the ships to know which version of Ram Odin to obey," said Ram. "Therefore I order you and all the other expendables to immediately kill every copy of Ram except me.""I'm so sorry," said the expendable. "One of the versions of Ram Odin did not include the word 'immediately,' and therefore his order was complete a fraction of a second before all the others. He is the real Ram Odin."Ram gave a little half smile. "How ironic. By specifying that you should act at once-"The expendable reached out with both hands, gave Ram's head a twist, and broke his neck. The sentence remained unfinished, but that did not matter, since the person saying it was not the real Ram Odin.”

“Just don't eat all of it," Ram fusses. "It could be tampered with. You should show it to your dad first, he'll know--""Ram has Seahorse Syndrome," Sahara tells me wisely."What's that?" I ask."In seahorses the dad's the one who gets pregnant and has babies. We learned about it in life science class. Ram thinks he's a mother hen. So he must be a seahorse.”

“Lights and darks. And suddenly i was here, where everything seems strange. And I don't know why. Like the Fox and the Crow, I don't know the whole story yet. But that's a good reason to go on, don't you think?" "Go where?" said the Scarecrow. "Go forward," said the girl. "See something. Learn something. Figure it out. We won't ever get the whole thing, I bet, but we'll get something. And then we'll have something to tell when we're old about what happened to us when we were young." "Now?" said the Scarecrow. "Can you tell it now?" "After," said the girl. "We have to have the BEFORE first, and that's life" "And what's life?" said the scarecrow. "Moving," said the girl. "Moving on. Shall we move on? Will you come with me?”

“The choices we make in our life don't have to define us. It's what we learn from them that's important.”