“ We shall take a star out of the skies and shall set thousands of worlds on fire... Cordwainer Smith
“ And now if they should break or you should fall, you might faint for a year or two. If that happens, your local system takes over: that's the pack on your back. Cordwainer Smith
“ You are Rod McBan the hundred and fifty-first. Specifically, you are a spinal column with a small bone box at one end, the head, and with reproductive equipment at the other end. Inside the bone box y… Cordwainer Smith
“ He looked at his dry old hand and it seemed to him that in this atmosphere, he had himself become more reptilian than human. I am caught by the dry, drab enturtlement of old, old age, he murmured, but… Cordwainer Smith
“ Joan commented, upon sentence, My body is your property, but my love is not. My love is my own, and I shall love you fiercely while you kill me. Cordwainer Smith
“ At sixteen Helen was already famous, and at seventeen already forgotten, and very much alone. Cordwainer Smith
“ Crowding together to see something which would ease the boredom of perfection and time. Cordwainer Smith
“ It was all of this: The beat and the heat and the neat repeat of the notes which poured from the congohelium—metal never made for music, matter and anti-matter locked in a fine magnetic grid to ward o… Cordwainer Smith
“ There is no call for you to get tragic about it. Tragedy is easy enough to contrive. And if you want to be tragic, you can be tragic without destroying thirty thousand other people or without wasting… Cordwainer Smith
“ You and I are animals, darling, not even real people, but people do not understand the teaching of Joan, that whatever seems human is human. Cordwainer Smith
“ There is no all-purpose computer built that weighs as little as a hundred and fifty pounds. You do. Cordwainer Smith
“ Chang nodded sagely. My father insisted on it. He said, ‘You may be proud of being a scanner. I am sorry you are not a man. Conceal your defects.’ So I tried. I wanted to tell the old boy about the up… Cordwainer Smith
“ She warned him, kindly enough, about manners when he forgot the simple ceremonies of eating which everyone knew, such as standing up to unfold the napkin or putting the scraps into the solvent tray an… Cordwainer Smith
“ Was that what people learned between the stars? To care for other people very much indeed and to spring upon them only to reveal love and not devouring to their prey? Cordwainer Smith
