She was a reader; there were many citizens who were not. The prevailin — John Varley

"They were testing ways whereby people didnt have to live in Chicago. It was a wonder to me. I had thought Chicago was inevitable, like diarrhea."

"I found that it is much more pleasurable to read adventures than to live them."

"I don’t have much truck with romantic notions of human destiny, or Gods, or Good Guys winning out in the end. I have seen destiny in action, and I can tell you, it stinks."

"I am vehemently anti-religion. That is, organized religion. I despise them all. I try to despise them equally, but lately Islam has shot to the top of my hate list, for obvious reasons. I don’t give a shit what they do in their own squalid little dictatorships, but they seem to want to export “Submission” to the whole world, and they are willing to kill the likes of Salman Rushdie and those Danish cartoonists for insulting Islam. They are basically living somewhere around the 8th Century, and I often wish I had a time machine to send them back there. (Yes, I know there are moderates. So why don’t they do something about the zealots?) So when I mention religion at all in my stories, the practitioners are usually doing something nutty. About as nutty as praying five times a day facing Mecca, saying a rosary, handling deadly snakes, or speaking in tongues."

"Buildings were just the worlds furniture, and he didnt care how it was arranged."

"There were worlds in the jewel. There was ancient Barsoom of my childhood fairy tales; there was Middle Earth with brooding castles and sentient forests. The jewel was a window on something unimaginable, a place where there were no questions and no emotions but a vast awareness."