Don't tell me about worth," Nita said. "My father commands fleets." "The wealthy measure everything with the weight of their money." Tool leaned close. "Sadna once risked herself and the rest of her crew to help me escape from an oil fire... Your father commands fleets. And thousands of half-men, I am sure. But would he risk himself to save a single one?

Men are loyal when you lead from the front.

Food should come from the place of its origin, and stay there. It shouldn't spend its time crisscrossing the globe for the sake of profit.

Most of the news about the state of the environment is pretty ugly. This is frightening for me personally, but actually motivational for me artistically.

We write dust epitaphs for our vanquished enemies and watch them blow away in the desert wind.

At some point, you realize you can't provide a perfectly monolithic description of a foreign culture's future any more than you can provide a monolithic description of your own hometown's future. Your choices about what to emphasize and what to leave out make all the difference, and ultimately, your fingerprints and biases and viewpoints are going to be all over the story.

Nature has become something new. It is ours now, truly. And if our creation devours us, how poetic will that be?