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

Part of waging war is knowing when you’re outgunned.

The view was in an unearthly way beautiful, but it was also unendurable. It implied too much

Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity.

Certainly it's a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don't seem as bad as the Dominion histories make them out to be. Though clearly they were imperfect.""I don't deny that they were imperfect," Julian said in a distant voice. "I'm not uncritical of the Secular Ancients, Adam. They had all sorts of vices, and they committed one sin for which I can never bring myself to entirely forgive them.""What sin is that?""They evolved into us," he said.

Sandra had studied psychiatry in order to understand the nature of despair, but all she had really learned was the pharmacology of it. The human mind was easier to medicate than to comprehend.

Ars moriendi ars vivendi est: the art of dying is the art of living.

Are you just a car salesman or are you a poet too?” “I've never been accused of poetry before.

By definition, you can’t experience your own death. Death is the end of consciousness. And consciousness persists. In the language of physics, consciousness is conserved.I am the one who wakes up in the morning.Always.Every morning.I don’t die.I just become increasingly unlikely.

The universe, it seemed, was full to brimming with lonesome places.

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

The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.