"The place gave a bad name to dingy and escaped being run-down only because it had never been up."
"And I had been manipulated, surely, but an actor, of all people, has no business complaining he has been tricked."
"Long-term thinking requires a clarity the natural human mind is not good at."
"He seemed dead, but perhaps “dead” meant something different. Perhaps it meant something less permanent."
"Just because I did good doesn’t mean I don’t feel bad, because the feeling bad, it’s not particularly because of anything that’s happened, it’s just the way I’m wired."
"I am nothing but a scientist of sufficiently advanced technology, which is to say a magician."
"Aunt Charla is one of those people who take pride in not knowing about anything that’s changed in the world in the last thirty years."
"The emergent ecologies that were recolonising the place were very light on mammals and birds. You got little ones, mostly nocturnal even when their ancestors had been diurnal. The big winners were amphibians, reptiles, bugs. Because hot and damp works for ectotherms."
"I’m the expert, God help us all."
"And wasn’t the planet supposed to die? Wasn’t that the deal about human-generated climate change? That the world was supposed to predecease us? I mean, that certainly seemed to be what we’d agree to. That, okay, we’d destroy everything, but that was fine just so long as the last thing to get destroyed was us. And here's all this. Flourishing. Fucking flourishing in the death zone. Heat-adapted in a way we could never be."
"That project was already well underway when I first came to the Zone. Hidden in all the budgetary overspends and the trees. But I became a part of it. And as for Why? When a conglomerate of future-minded corporations gives you a bottomless well of untraceable funds and a team of top scientists with no scruples at all, it becomes all very, Because it’s there."
"By all means, go up to the surface and have the run of the Zone, Doctor Marks. Pit the indefatigability of your human spirit against the planet. See how that goes for you."