“Family. It was just a word…Could see its letters all strung together. But it was a symbol, too. And people thought they knew what it meant…It was a thing everyone had an opinion about—that it was all you had when you didn’t have anything else, that family was there, that blood was thicker than water, whatever. But when Nailer thought about it, most of these words and ideas just seemed like good excuses for people to behave badly and get away with it. Family wasn’t more reliable than marriages or friendships…maybe less…The blood bond was nothing. It was the people that mattered. If they covered your back, and you covered theirs, then maybe that was worth calling family.”

“I'm particularly interested in black swan events: unprecedented surprises that destroy the conventional wisdom about how the world works.”

“I'm not proud of it, but I'm a great liar when I travel. I smile and lie, and things are smooth.”

“Science fiction has these obsessions with certain sciences - large scale engineering, neuroscience.”

“I was interested in political failure here in the U.S. The way we're failing to work together to solve even our smallest problems, let alone the complex ones.”

“At root, I think that any given technology (think nuclear power, gunpowder, the written word...) has the potential to improve our lives, wound it, and also to create unexpected accidents. It's not the technology that's the problem, it's us, the users. However angelic or demonic, or thoughtful or thoughtless we happen to be is then amplified by our technologies.”

“Everything’s bad, until you find something worse.”

“They’d blame a castoff just for breathing. You could be good as gold and they’d still blame you.”

“Start by loving, instead of needing.”

“Thanks to the centrifugal pump, places like Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas had thrown on the garments of fertility for a century, pretending to greenery and growth as they mined glacial water from ten-thousand-year-old aquifers. They'd played dress-up-in-green and pretended it could last forever. They'd pumped up the Ice Age and spread it across the land, and for a while they'd turned their dry lands lush. Cotton, wheat, corn, soybeans -- vast green acreages, all because someone could get a pump going. Those places had dreamed of being different from what they were. They'd had aspirations. And then the water ran out, and they fell back, realizing too late that their prosperity was borrowed, and there would be no more coming.”

“Never beg for mercy. Accept that you have failed. Begging is for dogs and humans.”