Endymion

The shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.

But as with so many things in our lives, the reason for doing something is not the important thing. It is the fact of doing that remains.

The universe is indifferent to our fates. This was the crushing burden that the character took with him as he struggled through the surf toward survival or extinction. The universe just does not give a shit.

Meaning no disrespect, sir, but there's no way in the Good Lord's fucking universe that anyone can bar accidents or the unexpected.

You want to be a hero,” he repeated. “You want to be one of those rare human beings who make history, rather than merely watch it flow around them like water around a rock.

The universe just does not give a shit.

So many important things pass quickly without being understood at the time. So many powerful moments are buried beneath the absurd.

Be assured, I do not suffer from a sense of humor.

How do I know what I think until I see what I say?

I remembered Grandam telling me about an early Old Earth scientist, one Charles Darwin, who had come up with one of the early theories of evolution or gravitation or somesuch, and how—although raised a devout Christian even before the reward of the cruciform—he had become an atheist while studying a terrestrial wasp that paralyzed some large species of spider, planted its embryo, and let the spider recover and go about its business until it was time for the hatched wasp larvae to burrow its way out of the living spider’s abdomen.

Life is brutal that way … the loss of irrecoverable moments amid trivia and distraction.

If we had some cheese, we could have a ham-and-cheese sandwich,” replies Father Captain de Soya, “if we had some ham.

Philosophical poetry by moonlight was all right, but guns that shot straight and true were a necessity.

Designed from DNA to compute,” I said, appalled at the thought of Core machines being given the benefit of the doubt when it came to souls.

And then Robinson Crusoe stripped naked, swam out to his ship, filled his pockets with biscuits, and swam back to shore...." "What?" I said, hefting my pack and frowning at the child. "Nothing," she said, getting to her feet. "Just an old preHegira book that Uncle Martin used to read to me. He used to say that proofreaders have always been incompetent assholes-even 1400 years ago.

The fabric of space/time is much like one of the elaborate Vatican tapestries, thinks Nemes, and she who begins pulling on loose threads does so at the peril of watching the whole tapestry ravel.

You’re upsetting a delicate balance of corruption that has existed here for centuries.

If there is a God, I thought, it’s a painkiller.

The universe is indifferent to our fates.

I’m hungry, Raul,” she said from the head of the stairs. “Want to go down and see what this old ship’s galley can whomp up for lunch?

shortest route to courage is absolute ignorance.

Have you ever noticed how on a trip—even a very long one—it is often the first week or so that stands out most clearly in your memory? Perhaps it is the enhanced perception that voyages bring, or perhaps it is an effect of orientation response on the senses, or perhaps it is simply that even the charm of newness soon wears off, but it has been my experience that the first days in a new place, or seeing new people, often set the tone for the rest of the trip. Or in this case, the rest of my life.

As your priest,” says de Soya, “I will warn you again about the use of profanity. As your commanding officer, I order you to come up with as many surprises as you can to kill that spiked son of a bitch.” They

Doomed with enfeebled carcass to outstretch His loathed existence through ten centuries,

Information is always to be treasured, Raul. It is behind only love and honesty in a person’s attempt to understand the universe.

We must not forget that the human soul, however independently created our philosophy represents it as being, is inseparable in its birth and in its growth from the universe into which it is born. —TEILHARD DE CHARDIN

I loved you then. I loved you backward and forward in time. I loved you beyond boundaries of time and space.