“The next best thing to winning is giving the other guy such a bloody nose, he wonders if beating you was worth it.”

“I am Captain Dakkan. I am in charge of this facility.""Captain Dakkan," Ryan repeated. "It's good to meet you. I've heard... well... nothing about you...”

“I need some shut-eye," Marcus said. "All these last-minute heroics make a man sleepy.”

“Janice rolled her eyes. First, the doctor had ogled her, and now Karr was leering at her and licking his lips lasciviously."Oh this is great. I'm being mentally undressed by a space pirate.”

“To love and win is the best thing.To love and lose, the next best.”

“After moving his family from Yakima to Paradise, California, in 1958, he enrolled at Chico State College. There, he began an apprenticeship under the soon-to-be-famous John Gardner, the first "real writer" he had ever met. "He offered me the key to his office," Carver recalled in his preface to Gardner’s On Becoming a Novelist (1983). "I see that gift now as a turning point." In addition, Gardner gave his student "close, line-by-line criticism" and taught him a set of values that was "not negotiable." Among these values were convictions that Carver held until his death. Like Gardner, whose On Moral Fiction (1978) decried the "nihilism" of postmodern formalism, Carver maintained that great literature is life-connected, life-affirming, and life-changing. "In the best fiction," he wrote "the central character, the hero or heroine, is also the ‘moved’ character, the one to whom something happens in the story that makes a difference. Something happens that changes the way that character looks at himself and hence the world." Through the 1960s and 1970s he steered wide of the metafictional "funhouse" erected by Barth, Barthelme and Company, concentrating instead on what he called "those basics of old-fashioned storytelling: plot, character, and action." Like Gardner and Chekhov, Carver declared himself a humanist. "Art is not self-expression," he insisted, "it’s communication.”

“One of them was Fritz Thyssen, one of the earliest and biggest contributors to the party. Fleeing the "Nazi regime has ruined German industry." And to all he met abroad he proclaimed, "What a fool ( Dummkopf ) I was!”