Michael Bishop

“What motivates you, then? Please don’t tell me altruism. I am not quite so gullible as that.”

“I have thought a little about a telepathic community, and I have decided that it would most likely create either a thoroughly paranoiac or a thoroughly homogeneous unit of individuals. Complete suspicion and hostility in the one instance, total harmony and concord in the other. I do not like either alternative.”

“God could hardly damn me for a coward, great cosmic exemplar of laissez-faire that he is.”

“What was reprehensible in being fearful in the presence of the unknown?”

“Tiglathpileser was a human, it’s rumored. And Caligula. So were a whole host of twentieth-century tyrants. So presumably were the brain-dead idiots who turned the Earth into a treeless detention camp. Being human, I’m afraid, doesn’t automatically confer demigod status on anyone.”

““The True Word. Once every quarter, once every new-style month, I preach it.”“The True Word on what? Everybody’s got his own true word, you know.”“On how not to die, woman. The basis of every religion.”“No,” Zoe said. Not every one of them; just the ones that don’t know exactly what to do with the here-and-now.””

“His foot always got caught in that wide, loose stirrup: his mouth.”