“If humanity were capable of being satisfied, then they'll still be living in trees and eating bugs out of one another's fur. Anna had walked on a moon of Jupiter. She'd look up through a dome-covered sky at the great red spot, close enough to see the swirls and eddies of a storm larger than her home world. She'd tasted water thawed from ice as old as the solar system itself. And it was that human dissatisfaction, that human audacity that had put her there.”

“The only right you have with anyone in life is to the right to walk away.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“He almost blacks out again, but he’s not sure if it’s the stroke or the thrust gravity. He’s pretty sure driving blood pressure higher while having a stroke is considered poor form.”

“Intellectually he knows that the blood is being pressed to the back of his body, pooling in the back part of his cerebellum and flooding his kidneys. He hasn’t done enough medical work to know what that means, but it can’t be good.”

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

“The grass is always greener on the other side of personal extinction.”

“It was some of Solomon’s favorite music because it was dense and intellectually complicated and he wasn’t expected to dance to it.”