The Ophiuchi Hotline

This was a killer. Quite possibly a soldier, though Lilo was not expert in mental diseases.

If only she could convince them, perhaps she could convince herself.

You've got to watch yourself when you get as old as I am. You have to try new things, sometimes for no better reason than that they’re new. Otherwise you rust.

But now she was fifty-seven, and suddenly ancient. Soon she would be dead. Dead. You can’t get any more ancient than that.

She was a reader; there were many citizens who were not. The prevailing social explanation for illiteracy was that there were people who were temperamentally unsuited for reading—and indeed there were few callings in a computerized, video-saturated world that required literacy. Lilo accepted that, but had always had a feeling that most people never learned to read because they simply were not smart enough.

We’ve become a race of engineers. What we never seem to understand is that after it’s time to railroad, there’s time to build a beautiful railroad. The state of the art has advanced enough; we can afford to pay a small penalty in efficiency.

It was not pleasant to admit what one is willing to do to go on living.

I found that it is much more pleasurable to read adventures than to live them.