"He'd turned away from a life on basic to live in the stars, or if not the stars, at least the rocks that floated free in the night sky."

"The fact had become as invisible to him as someone on Earth thinking about being held to a spinning celestial object by nothing more than mass, shielded from the fusion reaction of the sun by only distance and air."

"I'm sorry you lost the suit,' he said.She shrugged.'At this point, it was mostly a metaphor anyway,' she said..."

"The ocean, just outside, seeped into everything. An olfactory reminder to everyone passing through the Ellis Island of the space age that Earth was absolutely unique to the human race. The birthplace of everything. The salt water flowing in everyone's veins first pulled from the same oceans right outside the building. The seas had been around longer than humans, had helped create them, and then when they were all dead, it'd take their water back without a thought."

"A near-fatal case of scurvy being the only reason I can imagine drinking something with grapefruit juice in it."

"Some things were secret even after you told them."

"War without end. Well, what was history without that? And how would having the stars change anything?"

"This was especially true in some millennialist sects that filled their literature with paintings of Armageddon. Pictures of terrified people running away from some formless fiery doom that burned their world down behind them, while smug worshipers-of the correct religion, of course-watched from safety as God got with the smiting."

"I'm a long-flight pilot. Pushing a little bubble of air-filled metal across an ocean of nothing is what I was born to do."

"You know, Naomi said, 'if you're looking at hundreds of people burning to death as a problem solving itself, that may be more evidence that you're on wrong side."

"Holden was starting to feel like they were all monkeys playing with a microwave. Push a button, a light comes on inside, so it's a light. Push a different button and stick your hand inside, it burns you, so it's a weapon. Learn to open and close the door, it's a place to hide things. Never grasping what it actually did, and maybe not even having the framework necessary to figure it out. No monkey ever reheated a frozen burrito. So here the monkeys were, poking the shiny box and making guesses about what it did."

"The closest analogy, the one her brain reached for and rejected and reached for again, was splashing into a lake. It was cold, but not cold. There was a smell, rich and loamy. The smell of growth and decay. She was aware of her body, the skin, the sinew, the curl of her gut. She was aware of the nerves that were firing in her brain as she became aware of the nerves firing in her brain. She unmade herself and watched herself being unmade. All the bacteria on her skin and in her blood, the virii in her tissues. The woman who had been Elvi Okoye became a landscape. A world. She fell farther in."

"Yeah,' Chris said. 'I lose a couple limbs getting drunk and falling into harvesting combine, I'm an idiot. I lose the same limbs because I happened to be standing next to the right door when the ship was damaged, I'm a hero."

"A woman's voice ululated on the sound system, somewhere between an Islamic call to prayer and orgasm with a drumbeat."

"And somehow, that changed everything about sex. The movements might all be the same, but the desire to communicate affection rather than demonstrate prowess changed what everything meant."

"On Mars, the joke went, a man's hole was his castle where values of castle approached dorm room."

"Or was that fatalism another good move in design space? Did the universe evolve eyes and wings and sense organs and bitter amusement at the prospect of death all the same way?"

"He is, however, Amos continued, 'keeping a constant rail gun lock on the Israel's reactor.Holden ran his fingers through his hair. 'So not too generous, then.'Say pretty please, but carry a one-kilo slug of tungsten accelerated to a detectable percentage of c."

"Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he'd ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of."

"It was a mating dance only slightly more dignified than presenting like a mandrill, but endearing in its own fashion."

"You want a shadow, you got to have light and something to get in its way."

"The problem with living with miracles was that they made everything seem plausible."

"All of nature was a record of crisis and destruction and adaptation and flourishing and being knocked back down again. What had happened on New Terra was singular and concrete, but the pattern it was part of seemed to apply everywhere and maybe always."

"For a moment, his pupils flickered blue, like there were tiny bathypelagic fish swimming in the deep trenches of his eyeballs."

"By the time the Somnambulist had set her creaking bones to rest on their assigned landing pad, Holden had lost all patience with human stupidity.So, of course, it came out to meet him."

"Partners, she said, and fired two rounds into his head."

"The margins of the space were bright without illuminating anything or casting shadows, sharp and terrible. It reminded her of the way schizophrenics and people suffering migraines would describe light as assaulting and dangerous."

"The OPA man, Anderson Dawes, was sitting on a cloth folding chair outside Miller's hole, reading a book. It was a real book - onionskin pages bound in what might have been actual leather. Miller had seen pictures of them before; the idea of that much weight for a single megabyte of data struck him as decadent."

"Part of his mind was screaming, but it was a distant one and easy to ignore."

"Nothing like a little shared racism to build ties with the boss."

"He remembered the old-timers from his navy days. Grizzled lifers who could soundly sleep while two meters away their shipmates played a raucous game of poker or watched the vids with the volume all the way up. Back then he'd assumed it was just learned behavior, the body adapting so it could get enough rest in an environment that never really had downtime. Now he wondered if those vets found the constant noise preferable. A way to keep their lost shipmates away. They probably went home after their twenty and never slept again."

"Fred's vacuum-rated armor protected him from the smell of viscera, but it reported it to him as a slight increase in atmospheric methane levels. The stench of death reduced to a data point."

"Because we can't just blow up enough things that this becomes a good situation."

"His words were full of hope and threat. Like the stars."

"Fayez whistled low. 'That is not dead which can eternal lie. Or, y'know, whatever."

"The velocities and forces involved in anything at orbital altitudes were enough to kill a human with just the rounding error. At their speeds, the friction from air too thin to breathe would set them on fire."

"I mean, yes, I did ask that. But that's not the part that you should be caring about right now. You lied to me. Your involvement with weaponizing the Protogen project is fully exposed, and that question is like asking what color Tuesday was. It's meaningless."

"Nothing wrong with a little optimism, long as it doesn't set policy...."

"The sex, he said. 'I just wanted to make sure that we were okay. That things were all right between us.'Well, she said, 'orgasm does release a lot of oxytocin, so I'm probably more fond of you than before."

"If we accept the premise that we're always wrong, it really removes the incentive to spend a lot of time trying to make good guesses because even the good guesses turn out to be wrong. So, make plausible guesses and tell a good story."

"The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster."

"In the artifacts that are conscious, memories of vanished lives still flicker. Tissues that were changed without dying hold the moment that a boy heard his sister was leaving home. They hold multiplication tables. They hold images of sexuality and violence and beauty. They hold the memories of flesh that no longer exists. They hold metaphors: mitochondria, starfish, Hitler's-brain-in-a-jar, hell realm. They dream. Structures that were neurons twitch and loop and burn and dream. Images and words and pain and fear, endless."

"Drainage tubes ran out of his belly and side, and there was a catheter the size of a pencil coming out his penis. Nothing particularly hurt, so he had to assume he was on pretty nearly all the narcotics there were."

"The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won't stop a missile, though. It won't alter the trajectory of a gauss round."

"Every now and then a green dot shifted to yellow. A soldier down, their armored suits detecting the injuries or death that rendered them combat ineffective. Combat ineffective. Such a nice euphemism for one of his kids bleeding out."

"It felt like waking up over and over without falling sleep in between."

"It throbbed with an inhuman power, tidal and deep and painful. Look at this too long, Elvi thought, and I will lose my mind in it. She took a step toward it, feeling the structures in the blackness respond to her. She felt as if she could see the spaces between molecules in the air, like atoms themselves had become a thin fog, and for the first time she could see the true shape of reality looming up just beyond her reach."

"You're too old for fairy tales, Baasen said."

"Later,' Amos said, 'when you're wishing we had this stuff, I am going to merciless in my mockery. And then we'll die."

"No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work."