There was often a great deal of grown-up fuss that seemed disproportionate to causes.

If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does.

Knowing makes all the difference... It's the difference between just trying to keep alive, and having something to live for

It must be, I thought, one of the race's most persistent and comforting hallucinations to trust that "it can't happen here" -- that one's own time and place is beyond cataclysm.

Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a precarious existence.

And again there are no words. Words exist that can, used by a poet, achieve a dim monochrome of the body's love, but beyond that they fail clumsily. My love flowed out to her, hers back to me. Mine stroked and soothed. Hers caressed. The distance - and the difference - between us dwindled and vanished. We could meet, mingle, and blend. Neither one of us existed any more; for a time there was a single being that was both. There was escape from the solitary cell; a brief symbiosis, sharing all the word.

...after all, what is a planet but an island in space?