You enter a state of controlled passivity, you relax your grip and accept that even if your declared intention is to justify the ways of God to man, you might end up interesting your readers rather more in Satan.

We know so little about each other. We lie mostly submerged, like ice floes, with our visible social selves projecting only cool and white.

In a nuclear age, and in an age of serious environmental degradation, apocalyptic belief creates a serious second order danger. The precarious logic of self-interest that saw us through the Cold War would collapse if the leaders of one nuclear state came to welcome, or ceased to fear mass death.

...falling in love could be achieved in a single word—a glance.

Finally, you had to measure yourself by other people - there really was nothing else. every now and then, quite unintentionally, someone taught you something about yourself.

I believe the novella is the perfect form of prose fiction.

It was not generally realized that what children mostly wanted was to be left alone.