"The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it or to escape what is bad in it but we will escape it only by adding something better to it."

"I wondered how much time they'd spent practicing entrances like this one, smoothing away their rough edges and rendering them brief but potent expressions of effortless grace. I decided to stop thinking about it, and just be grateful that there was no circumstance, however, unlikely, that could put me in their place."

"Wives?' she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, 'None active,' as if wives were volcanoes."

"The microgravity or the very, very low amount of gravity that we have up in space forces some changes in different processes. It forces changes in us as human beings."

"Every now and then I read a poem that does touch something in me, but I never turn to poetry for solace or pleasure in the way that I throw myself into prose."