This wasn't prayer anyway, it was just argument with the gods. Prayer, he suspected as he hoisted himself up and turned for the door, was putting one foot in front of the other. Moving all the same.

Experience suggests it doesn't matter so much how you got here, as what you do after you arrive.

As the week wore on, Ivan contemplated the merits of inertia as a problem-solving technique with growing favor

People give themselves to you, in their talking, and in other ways, if you are quiet and patient and let them, and not in such a damned rush to give yourself to them you go bat-blind and deaf.

I am not a fate worse than death, dammit!

I'm very interested in the impact of biotechnology on the way people live.

The most important thing about quests, he decided, was not in finding what you went looking for, but in finding what you never could have imagined before you ventured forth.