"For as much as I hate the cemetery, I’ve been grateful it’s here, too. I miss my wife. It’s easier to miss her at a cemetery, where she’s never been anything but dead, than to miss her in all the places where she was alive."
"Damn real live people, getting in the way of peaceful ideals."
"You can’t afford anthropomorphic biases when some of the aliens most like us would rather make human hamburgers than peace."
"Trust your weapon, it is almost certainly smarter than you are. Remember this and you may yet live."
"Relations were never good (how comfortable can you really be with a race that sees you as a nutritious part of a complete breakfast)."
"What is it like when you lose someone you love?" Jane asked."You die, too. And you wait around for your body to catch up."
"Part of what makes us human is what we mean to other people, and what people mean to us. I miss meaning something to someone, having that part of being human."
"After our negotiations were completed, the dome would be imploded and launched toward the nearest black hole, so that none of its atoms would ever contaminate this particular universe again. I thought that last part was overkill."
"I'm going to go pee. If the universe is bigger and stranger than I can imagine, it's best to meet it with an empty bladder."
"The universe isn't going to be conquered by legions of geriatrics. No offense."
"The universe is a big place. Maybe we're not in the best neighborhood."
"I think back to the day I stood before my wife's grave for the final time, and turned away from it without regret, because I knew that what she was was not contained in that hole in the ground. I entered a new life and found her again, in a woman who was entirely her own person. When this life is done, I'll turn away from it without regret as well, because I know she waits for me, in another, different life."
"I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife's grave. Then I joined the army.Visiting Kathy's grave was the less dramatic of the two."
"What we don't know can't hurt us."
"You do what you have to do to give people closure; it makes them feel better and it doesn’t cost you much to do it. I’d rather apologize for something I didn’t really care about, and leave someone on Earth wishing me well, than to be stubborn and have that someone hoping that some alien would slurp out my brains. Call it karmic insurance."
"Colonization is the key to our race’s survival. It’s as simple as that. We must colonize or be closed off and contained by other races."
"She was my friend. Briefly, she was my lover. She was braver than I ever would have been in the moment of death. And I bet she was a hell of a shooting star."
"Leon had attached himself to me in Chicago like a fat, brat-and-beer-filled tick; I was amazed that someone whose blood was clearly half pork grease had made it to age seventy-five."
"The problem with aging is not that it's one damn thing after another—it's every damn thing, all at once, all the time."
"Well, I miss my wife, you know," I said. "But I also miss the feeling of, I don’t know, comfort. The sense you’re where you’re supposed to be, with someone you’re supposed to be with."
"You just know this is going to be bad," Susan said."—but when I went to college," Harry continued, throwing a piece of bread at Susan, "if your roommate died, you were usually allowed to skip your finals for that semester. You know, because of the trauma.""And oddly enough, your roommate got to skip them, too," Susan said. "For much the same reason."
"Then you're seventy-five, friends are dead, and you've replaced at least one major organ: you have to pee four times a night, and you can't go up a flight a stairs without being little winded -- and your're told you're in pretty good shape for your age. [....], in a decade you'll be eighty-five, and the only difference between you and a raisin will be that while you're both wrinkled and without a prostate, the raisin never had a prostate to begin with."