“Mahlia… understood Doctor Mahfouz and his blind rush into the village. He wasn’t trying to change them. He wasn’t trying to save anyone. He was just trying to not be part of the sickness. Mahlia had thought he was stupid for walking straight into death, but now, as she lay against the pillar, she saw it differently. She thought she’d been surviving. She thought that she’d been fighting for herself. But all she’d done was create more killing, and in the end it had all led to this moment, where they bargained with a demon … not for their lives, but for their souls” (p. 403)”

“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.”