I’m a long-flight pilot. Pushing a little bubble of air-filled metal across an ocean of nothing is what I was born to do.

A few generations living and dying without a sky, and enclosed spaces lost the atavistic terror of premature burial.

No one lived forever. But you fought for every minute you could get. Bought a little more with a lot of hard work.

The usual state of nature is recovering from the last disaster.

The moral high ground is a lovely place. It won’t stop a missile, though. It won’t alter the trajectory of a gauss round.

Or was that fatalism another good move in design space? Did the universe evolve eyes and wings and sense organs and bitter amusement at the prospect of death all the same way?

Dead’s not good, but at least it’s simple.

Fayez whistled low. “That is not dead which can eternal lie. Or, y’know, whatever.

You want a shadow, you got to have light and something to get in its way.

You can order the sun to come up if you time it right. I’m not driving this bus. Making it do what I want would be like talking someone out of a seizure.

You know, ” Naomi said, “if you’re looking at hundreds of people burning to death as a problem solving itself, that may be more evidence that you’re on wrong side.

To confront death every day, to see it yourself, you have to love the living.

I was embarrassed that I even wanted to become an actress because coming from L.A., with two older sisters in the business and a mom who had been a ballet dancer, it was such a cliche.

My memory of my household is of one immersed in books and music. I have a very intimate relationship with Bengali literature, particularly Tagore, and my interest besides reading then was music.

Fear has its uses but cowardice has none.

After I convinced them that I was a harmless novelist, I actually got them to give me a tour of the harem - which is usually off limits for tourists.

If we spend all our time gazing at the wonders ahead without remembering where we're standing right now, we're going to trip and fall flat on our face, over and over again.

People have a right to be shocked; the mention of unmentionable things is a kind of participation in them.

It’s not about what we do, or what we feel, it’s about what He did and what He felt. It’s about what Christ has done for us.

There is nothing more certain in Time or Eternity than what Jesus Christ did on the Cross.

More faults are often committed while we are trying to oblige than while we are giving offense.