Quotes
The nice thing about being a pessimist is that bittersweet is an improvement.
p. 141
“Now look,” Janice said. “If the king is so rich, why can’t he pay?”
“The king never pays for anything he can get free,” the ferra said. “That’s why he’s so rich.”
p. 93
“Earth, Earth,” the short, alien Carmody mused. “I think I remember the name now. There was a recent study of isolated worlds and the peculiarities of their development. Earth was mentioned as a planet covered with an obsessively overproductive species. Object manipulation is their outstanding modality. Their project is an attempt to live in their own, ever-accumulating waste products. In short, Earth is diseased place. I believe it is being phased out of the Galactic Master Plan on the basis of chronic cosmic incompatibility. The place will then be rehabilitated and turned into a refuge for daffodils.”
p. 29
Sweetie, if I’ve learned anything during my ten years at sea, it’s this. Never confuse your captain with God.
p. 74
“Myriad contradictory worlds,” lectured Professor Jerome Delacato, “forever splitting off from each other like branches on a tree, so that, somewhere out there, I am presently giving a lecture explaining how the many-worlds hypothesis cannot possibly be true.”
p. 88
Babies are like kittens, Julie, they grow into something much more sinister.
p. 258
Children, being close to the ground, have a special rapport with insects.
p. 17
“Everyone here does think as I do,” replied Nefertiti Jones’s double, “and consequently I have no enemies.”
p. 119
Often Burne found himself saying, “I don’t think you would make a very good soldier,” and with grating predictability he heard that he wouldn’t make a very good pacifist.
p. 188
Like most visionaries, The Teller saw the distant future with optical-glass clarity, the intermediate future with beeswax clarity, and the immediate future with the clarity of dark glasses dipped in tar.
p. 153
“On your planet, how do you tell somebody that you love her?”
“It’s very complicated. You say, ‘I love you,’ and then you stand back and see what happens.”
p. 112
“In fact, there’s probably only one thing worse than not being able to understand a person.”
“What’s that?” asked Nimrod.
“Being able to understand him completely.”
p. 76
