Like your kind/ we usually destroy what we cannot understand
Il genoma umano, l’anima umana, diffida dell’omogeneità, Raul. È sempre pronto a cogliere al volo l’occasione, a correre il rischio del cambiamento e della diversità.
I love life, Eleanor. It is that simple. Had I the choice, I would live forever, accepting pain and loss as my due and learning--across time--even to appreciate the sharp seasoning of this sadness.
I love being a poet. It’s the goddamned words I can’t stand.
Hell is also the memory of starving children in the slums of Armaghast and the smile of politicians sending boys off to die in colonial wars.
Don't go, Bobby, said my friend. It's not worth it.
Did you see any of us there? Kassad said nothing for more than a minute. The soft sounds of the river and the ship’s rigging suddenly seemed very loud. Finally Kassad took a breath. Yes. Silence stret...
… Thou art a dreaming thing; A fever of thyself—think of the Earth; What bliss even in hope is there for thee? What haven? every creature hath its home; Every sole man hath days of joy and pain, Wheth...
—It is hard to die. Harder to live.
Yes. But terrible heresies have proven to be grim truths many times before in the longer history of my Church, Sek Hardeen.
We’ve been stuck in one species since our Cro-Magnon ancestors helped to wipe out the smarter Neanderthals, she said. Now it’s our chance to diversify rapidly, and institutions like the Hegemony, the...
Those who ignore history’s lessons in the ultimate folly of war are forced to do more than relive them … they may be forced to die by them.
The universe is indifferent to our fates. This was the crushing burden that the character took with him as he struggled through the surf toward survival or extinction. The universe just does not give...
The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.
The left side of my brain had been shut down like a damaged section of a spinship being sealed off, airtight doors leaving the doomed compartments open to vacuum. I could still think. Control of the r...
The captain of HMS Terror often thought that he knew nothing about the future - other than that his ship and Erebus would never again steam or sail - but then he reminded himself of one certainty: whe...
Nothing could be done about it—every human above the lowest Dregs’ Hive poverty class had a comlog with biomonitor, many had implants, and each of these was tuned to the music of the datasphere, monit...
I remembered Grandam telling me about an early Old Earth scientist, one Charles Darwin, who had come up with one of the early theories of evolution or gravitation or somesuch, and how—although raised...
Human philosophy tends to shake down into values which might be categorized as intellectual, religious, moral, and aesthetic.
His imagination was always more real than the reality of daily life.