They had not yet attained the stupefying boredom of omnipotence; their experiments did not always succeed.

Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying.

It must be wonderful to be seventeen, and to know everything.

Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living.

I believe any malevolent supercivilisation would have rapidly self-destructed as we may be in the process of doing ourselves. If we do have contact, physical contact with aliens, I think it will be benign.

Why, Robert Singh often wondered, did we give our hearts to friends whose life spans are so much shorter than our own?

There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum.