The Space Between the Stars

There's a fine line, you know. Between having space and having nothing.

We'll meet here, he'd said. If the world ever ends. How had something so throwaway become the thing they returned to when everything else was breaking and falling apart?

Home's what's left over when you've figured out all the places you don't want to be. Sounds stupid, doesn't it? But that's what we do. We say not there and not there and not there, until there's only one place left.

We can't stop knowing it just because it's not convenient for you.

Live today. Then the next day. And the one after that. Unless you're inclined to jump off the nearest cliff, of course, but surviving is fairly addictive. Do it once, and you get more determined to keep on doing it.

All I can say is that nothing that happens is down to just one person, or just one action. It was part of life. Yours, and hers, and your father's.

She didn't want to be the human race. It sounded too big a responsibility.

Hope isn’t the same a having. There’s room in it for all the ways things could be.

The problem with stories and songs—no, scratch that, the problem with words—is that they make us squeeze all the messy bits of life into something small and snappy. All the things you feel. The times you hate one another. The times you want to tear open your skin and let the other person climb inside. All that, and only one word for it.

The problem with stores and songs—no, scratch that, the problem with words—is that they make us squeeze all the messy bits of life into something small and snappy. All the things you feel. The times you hate one another. The times you want to tear open your skin and let the other person climb inside. All that, and only one word for it.

from one god-bothering megalomaniac to the next,

cosmic nanny crossed with an all-powerful bodyguard.

It’s not that I don’t like people. It’s just that I like them better when they’re a long way away, and I can switch them off if I need to.

No, not him. And not her. That was how sex was, when it worked like it should. It wasn’t you. There was just the feel of it, of his hands on your body, and your hands on his, and that great, swelling force inside your chest, driving everything else out, until you stopped being so you, and became something else entirely.

The problem with stores and songs - no, scratch that, the problem with words -- is that they make us squeeze all the messy bits of life into something small and snappy. All the things you feel. The times you hate one another. The times you want to tear open your skin and let the other person climb inside. All that, and only one word for it.

There are different types of salvation." he said, diplomatically. "No." Rena shook him off. "There's only one. In the voice of God, speaking through the space between the stars.

Funny how the darkness smelled the same everywhere. She could have been anywhere in the universe, anywhere at all.

What happened when there was no prospect of anything beyond this generation? What happened when...