“I hope it's the good kind of dilemma," Reginald broke Patricia's reverie. "Whatever one you're on the horns of."..."I was just thinking," she said. "There are so many scary problems in the world. Like, I was just reading that we could be seeing the last of the bees in North America soon. And if that happened, food webs would just collapse, and tons more people would starve. But suppose you had the power to change things? You still might not be able to fix anything, because every time you solve a problem you'd create another problem. And maybe all these plagues and droughts are nature's way of striking a balance. We humans don't have any natural predators left, so nature has to find another way to handle us."..."I am, as you know, a fan of nature," said Reginald. "And yet, nature doesn't 'find ways' to do anything. Nature has no opinion, no agenda. Nature provides a playing field, a not particularly level one, on which we compete with all creatures great and small. It's more that nature's playing field is full of traps.”

“Maybe she would have done more good as a playwright than as a doctor, after all — clichés were like plaque in the arteries of the imagination, they clogged the sense of what was possible. Maybe if enough people had worked to demolish clichés, the world wouldn't have ended.”

“You turned your guilt into resentment, because that seems easier to face. You won't move on until you turn it back into guilt, and then into forgiveness for yourself.”

“As Dorothy J. Heydt famously said, the eight deadliest words for any work of fiction are 'I don't care what happens to these people.”

“He went to make coffee. Because when you have just heard about the possible transformation of the human race into feral monsters you need to be doing something with your hands and creating something hot and comforting for another person.”

“Believe me, there’s nothing worse than being both immortal and intelligent. Imagine the boredom! Plus you start to ask questions, and the worst thing about questions is that sometimes, they have answers.”

“Laurence felt a weird combination of shame and rage, as though he'd grown another new body part just in time to get punched in it.”

“And she felt like they, the two of them, right here, right now, could make something that defied tragedy.”

“Knowledge is justice”

“I don't actually think that ethics are derived from principles. At all." Patricia scooted a little closer again and touched his arm with a few cool fingertips. "I think that the most basic thing of ethics is being aware of how your actions affect others, and having an awareness of what they want and how they feel. And that's always going to depend on who you're dealing with.”

“Self-awareness paradoxically requires an awareness of the other.”