Honesty is the only way with anyone, when you'll be so close as to be living inside each other's skins.

When you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action. When you desire a consequence you had damned well better take the action that would create it.

Whether you function as welders or inspectors, the laws of physics are implacable lie-detectors. You may fool men. You will never fool the metal.

Hi, I'm a hero, but I can't tell you why. It's classified.

You don't pay back your parents. You can't. The debt you owe them gets collected by your children, who hand it down in turn. It's a sort of entailment. Or if you don't have children of the body, it's left as a debt to your common humanity. Or to your God, if you possess or are possessed by one. The family economy evades calculation in the gross planetary product. It's the only deal I know where, when you give more than you get, you aren't bankrupted - but rather, vastly enriched.

Forward momentum only worked as a strategy if one had correctly identified which way was forward.

I am not a fate worse than death, dammit!