Steven Barnes

"Definitions are just words, just labels. And once you label something, the label gets between you and the thing."

"“Chicken?” “Don’t want my feathers ruffled, it that’s what you mean.”"

"I’m damned tired of being needed. Being needed is just the flip side of being royally screwed."

"The price of chemical ecstasy was a dear one, paid in flesh and spirit."

"The world doesn’t give a damn what we feel or want. Only what we are, and what we do."

"He had no choice. And that one thing turned Heaven into Hell."

"“Cynical bastard, aren’t you?” “Every man is a mirror,” Nozawa said flatly. “We all reflect what we see.”"

"“Don’t be afraid of dying. A Warrior lives with death, Aubry. Welcome it as an ally. All other fears are just fragments of death, forms of unbecoming. A fighter clings to life, and therefore cannot win. A warrior treats life and death as the same thing, and therefore cannot lose.”"

"“That was what we were told. It doesn’t entirely ring true.” “Why not?” “Because the President of the United States is always bound by the deals that he makes to get to his position. Delacourte can’t make any kinds of drastic changes, regardless of what he claims. The chief executive isn’t an emperor.”"

"Aubry looked at her without shifting his head. Damn, she was lovely. An unpleasant question remained: What where they to each other? It was hard to say sometimes. Did he truly feel love, or just the effects of the Cyloxibin mushroom? And was there a difference?"

"Marketing is finding women who like sex or would like to find out if they do. Sales is convincing them that they want to go home with YOU, right NOW."

"It was on one of those terrible, fever-clouded days when the serpent beneath southern California awoke. It stretched from slumber, shedding its skin, the screams of its wrath heard in the shriek of tortured steel, of splintering wood and concrete. Maxine was torn from her slumber by the moans of the dying and the awful sound of her ramshackle apartment shifting on its foundations. “Earthquake!” She pulled herself from the bed, stumbled from her building into the street, and watched the lurching structures and snapping powerlines, the buckling sidewalks and exploding water mains, as a seismic debt long outstanding came due."