Mazer, i don't want to keep dreaming these things. I'm afraid to sleep. I keep thinking of things i don't want to remember. My whole life keeps playing out as if i were a recorder and someone else wanted to watch the most terrible parts of my life

I think you don't grow up until you stop worrying about other people's purposes or lack of them and find the purposes you believe in for yourself.

Isn't it possible, he wondered, for one person to love another without trying to own each other? Or is that buried so deep in our genes that we can never get it out? Territoriality. My wife. My friend. My lover. My outrageous and annoying computer personality who's about to be shut off at the behest of a half-crazy girl with OCD on a planet that I never heard of and how will I live without [her] when she's gone?

Being young is an 18 year prison sentence for a crime your parents committed. But you do get time off for good behavior.

It's all just fictions anyway. We do what we do and then we make up reasons for it afterward but they're never the true reasons, the truth is always just out of reach.

Soldiers can sometimes make decisions that are smarter than the orders they've been given.

Come into our home, daughters of Earth; dwell in our tunnels, harvest our fields; what we cannot do, you are now our hands to do for us. Blossom, trees; ripen, fields; be warm for them, suns; be fertile for them, planets: they are our adopted daughters, and they have come home.