“Oh no, this was real. And it just went to show that her secret weakness in literary escapism did not translate well into reality. The last thing she needed or wanted in real life was a bonded alpha male. Romantic fiction aside, they were serious jackass material.”

“Alphole heroes are just domineering assholes disguising themselves as alpha males. Real alpha males don't need to be assholes.”

“There's no real objection to escapism, in the right places... We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism, in fact you might say that science fiction is escape into reality... It's a fiction which does concern itself with real issues: the origin of man; our future. In fact I can't think of any form of literature which is more concerned with real issues, reality.”

“Oh no, real life is escape. The great terrors, the horrors--we hope--of your life come from reading fiction.”

“She was too well acquainted with the way things work in real life. Real life sucked. But it was real. It was unapologetic. It made no excuses. It just was.”

“These things were...well...they were dreams-made-real. And once dreams became real, they escaped the power of the dreamer and became their own deadly things, capable of independent action.”