There was no safety. There was no pride. All there was, was money. Everything became money, and money became everything. Money treated us as if we were things, and we died.

The trouble is you can shut your eyes but you can’t shut your mind.

No, we do it for the money.'And, because we above all must know the value of a human life, we do it for a great deal of money. 'There can be few cleaner motives, so shorn of all pretence.'Nil mortifi, sine lucre. Remember. No killing without payment.'He paused for a moment.'And always give a receipt,' he added.

I should have learned this, she thought. I wanted to learn fire, and pain, but I should have learned people.

At such times the universe gets a little closer to us. They are strange times, times of beginnings and endings. Dangerous and powerful. And we feel it even if we don't know what it is. These times are not necessarily good, and not necessarily bad. In fact, what they are depends on what *we* are.

In a distant and secondhand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part… See… Great A’Tuin the turtle comes, swimming slowly through the interstellar gulf, hydrogen frost on his ponderous limbs, his huge and ancient shell pocked with meteor craters.

One cannot help feeling that some alternative occupation—lettuce farming, say—would offer somewhat less of a risk of being put to death by installments. Why do you persist in it?”Goldeneyes Dactylos shrugged.“I’m good at it,” he said.

Sometimes the moon is light and sometimes it's in shadow, but you should always remember it's the same moon.

What the hell. If you had to go, why not go with style?