“[A] couple I had known - who were old friends - asked me what I was going to work on next. I told them I wanted to write a near future book about AIDS concentration camps. They were vehement in their response: they thought it was a terrible idea. Their words both shocked and saddened me. "Do you really want to write a book about homosexuals?" they asked me. "Won't people who read your work be influenced toward sin?"I notice that I don't hear from them much lately.”

“Noble words, my friend; you can't drink them or wrap them around your feet or burn them in your firepit or give them to children crying in hunger......They will cry for a month, then they will eat his share of the food. And wouldn't he want it that way?”

“I say, did you hear me?" The old man shook a worn walking stick at the oak. "I said move it and I meant it! I was sitting on that rock" -he pointed to a boulder- "enjoying the rising sun on my old bones when you had the nerve to cast a shadow over it and chill me! Move this instant. I say!" The tree did not respond. It also did not move. "I won't take any more of your insolence!" The old man began to beat on the tree with his stick. "Move or I'll - I'll -" "Someone shut that looney in a cage!" Fewmaster Toede shouted, galloping back from the front of the caravan. "Get your hands off me!" the old man shreiked at the draconians who ran up and accosted him. He beat on them feebly with his staff until they took it away from him. "Arrest the tree!" he insisted. "Obstructing sunlight! That's the charge!”

“[P]eople only make decisions based on what they know. You can have everyone in the country vote freely and democratically and still come up with the wrong answer - if the information they base that decision on is wrong. People don't want the truth [when] it is complicated. They don't want to spend years debating an issue. They want it homogenized, sanitized, and above all, simplified into terms they can understand...Governments are often criticized for moving slowly, but that deliberateness, it turns out, is their strength. They take time to think through complex problems before they act. People, however, are different. People react first from the gut and then from the head...give that knee-jerk reflex real power to make its overwhelming will known as a national mandate instantly and you can cause a political riot. Combine these sins - simplification of information and instant, visceral democratic mandates - and you lose the ability to cool down. There is no longer deliberation time between events that may or may not be true and our reaction to them. Policy becomes instinct rather than thought.”

“A 'why' is a dangerous thing... It challenges old, comfortable ways, forces people to think about that they do instead of just mindlessly doing it. (Haplo)...I think the danger is not so much in asking the 'why' as in believing you have come up with the only answer. (Alfred)”

“Sometimes, in the still watches of the night, when he lies in bed beside her, Tanis will find himself thinking of me. He will remember my last words, he will be touched by them. I have given them their happiness. And she must live with the knowledge that I will live always in Tanis’s heart. What love they might find together, I have poisoned. My revenge upon them both is complete. Now, have you brought what I sent you for?”

“I will do this. Nothing in my life matters except this. No moment of my life exists except this moment. I am born in this moment, and if I fail, I will die in this moment.”