“The Scriven men wore stack-heeled boots and pearl-studded evening coats; the ladies in their vast skirts looked like mythical creatures, half woman, half sofa.”

“And isn't that what all boys want and all men, too? Just to be taken seriously?”

“If only Myrtle would pay attention to the Boy's Own Journal, Blackwood's Magazine, etc., she would know that these creatures were Threls, who come from a worldlet called Threlfall on the far side of the asteroid belt. This Threlfall is a cheerless, chilly spot, and the whole history and religion of the Threls has been concerened with their quest to knit a nice woolly coverlet for it.”

“But boys will be boys, even the ones who are only girls dressed up: That's one of the rules of the world.”

“Godshawk looked surprised, the way that people generally do when you ask them philosophical questions in shrubberies in the middle of the night.”

“That's what History teaches us, I think, that life goes on, even though individuals die and whole civilizations crumble away: The simple things last; they are repeated over and over by each generation.”

“That's the trouble with a story spinner. You never know what's real and what's made up. Even when they are telling the truth, they can't stop themselves from spinning it into something better; something prettier, with more of a pattern to it.”