“You mean old books?""Stories written before space travel but about space travel.""How could there have been stories about space travel before --""The writers," Pris said, "made it up.”

“The old sailors who traveled Earth's seas were said to have loved the ocean. The great captains said they were married to the sea or called the sea their mistress. Modern sailors held no such fantasies about outer space. Space did not love or hate, it simply killed anything it touched.”

“One of the things that everybody knows about space travel but never mentions is its aphrodisiac quality.”

“It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher. Space travel has again made children of us all.”

“Traveling through space is stupifyingly monotonous.”

“But define 'completely ridiculous shit,'" Duvall said. "Does space travel count? Contact with alien races? Does quantum physics count? Because I don't understand that crap at all. As far as I'm concerned, quantum physics could have been written by a hack.”