Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind and some you carry with you, world without end.

Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

What had been released into the desert vacuum and starry oases of the galaxy was the inexorable logic of reproduction and natural selection. What followed was parasitism, predation, symbiosis, interdependency chaos, complexity, life.

You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters.

Promises were like bad checks, easy to write and hard to cash.

There's no drug that'll make a stupid man smart.