“The messages coming back flooded the comm buffers with rage and sorrow, threats of vengeance and offers of aid. Those last were the hardest. New colonies still trying to force their way into local ecosystems so exotic that their bodies could hardly recognize them as life at all, isolated, exhausted, sometimes at the edge of their resources. And what they wanted was to send back help. He listened to their voices, saw the distress in their eyes. He couldn't help, but love them a little bit. Under the best conditions, disasters and plagues did that. It wasn't universally true. There would always be hoarders and price gouging, people who closed their doors to refugees and left them freezing and starving. But the impulse to help was there too. To carry a burden together, even if it meant having less for yourself. Humanity had come as far as it had in a haze of war, sickness, violence, and genocide. History was drenched in blood. But it also had cooperation and kindness, generosity, intermarriage. The one didn’t come without the other.”

“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.”