“The planet doesn’t hate you,” Theo had once said. “But its intimacies — Robert Charles Wilson

"But really, who do you think we’re working for? Not some Sunday school god, not the proverbial loving shepherd. The shoving leopard, more like."

"“You think Wexler is lying?” “I think he’s fallible,” Byron had replied."

"It was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat gaze of a video screen."

"“Maybe you were better off not knowing.” “Ignorance is not bliss.”"

"Zoe slowed but didn’t stop. She kept her hands in front of her, still a judicious distance from the animal. But close enough to smell it. Close enough to see the steam rising from its warm underbelly into the night air. Four billion years of un-Earthly evolution had shaped this aggregate of cells, this beast. She looked at it. And, amazingly, it looked at her. An impossible distance from the planet of her birth, this miracle had happened: Clay had made life. Life regarded life. First light, Zoe thought."

"He was as alone as he had ever been, frighteningly alone, in a borderless land of shaded forests and rocky, abyssal gorges. But that was all right. He didn’t much mind being alone. It was what happened when people were around that worried him."