"Zithsa hunter claim they sometimes see man-shaped creatures in the lowlands. Mist demons, the hunters call them, and say that they are the ghosts of the fabled lost race. I say they are half vodka, half imagination."

“You can’t hate change. It’s like hating life.”

“It was both true, and not the complete truth, like so much of his talk.”

“Stay the same and after a while you come to think that nothing will ever change.”

“We wish not to be alone in the universe, Dorthy, and this drives people to invent things that are not really there.”

“Things are simply what they are, neither good nor bad. The potential for evil is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

“Many people were bitterly puzzled that the first truly intelligent aliens to be found should be so immediately, unremittingly hostile, but the astronomers shrugged it off. The universe was at best a marginal place for life.”