John Scalzi is a fresh and appealing new voice, and Old Man's War is classic SF seen from a modern perspective—a fast-paced tour of a daunting, hostile universe.

We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.

Nobody wants to conduct an autopsy on a dead saint.

For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .

We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father's unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

I don't believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive.

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere.

In life, some laugh, some cry, some live, some die. The choice is ours to crawl or to fly.

They were determined to find something mechanically wrong with him - because broken machines are easier to fix.

Opera lovers may be the narrowest people in the world.

Any man's life will be filled with constant and unexpected encouragement if he makes up his mind to do his level best each day.

For me, I never ever felt the ownership or any identity with any community of disabilities. I didn't grow up being told that I was a disabled child.

There are a lot of people that never get their stories told.

Your business will look totally different from your customer's viewpoint, so jump the counter and start to see things from their perspective.

The three roles that I have always admired are Valjean, Phantom and Jesus and I've enjoyed them all so much.

You can't bomb a people just in case.

Also, I sort of let my appearance go, to the point where I was maybe ten to seventy pounds overweight.