City of Golden Shadow

...Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce.

He had once thought it was strange to have a friend you'd never met. Now it was even stranger, losing a friend you'd never really had

There is no such thing as an accident. That's what science is all about. (...) There are only patterns we don't yet recognize.

All people know the Greater Hunger...It is the hunger for warmth, for family, for connection to the stars and the earth and other living things..." "For love?" Renie asked. "Yes, I suppose that could be true.

Go down." It seemed obvious. "You have to go down before you can come out - that's how these things always work.

Never trust people that like to call things by initials, that's my philosophy.

... Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build--but what happens when in all the world there are only termite hills left but no bush?

So that's what--one "yes," one "not sure," and one "I had had a dream about a bug.

Ho! We are being taunted by some sort of otherworldly fireflies. Someone fetch me my rifle!

The world was all mud and wire. The war in the heavens was only a faint imitation of the horror men had learned to make.

...a proud man who could do more than he is asked to do. It is not good for the spirit.