Quotes & Highlights

“There aren’t any new starts,” Bobbie said. “All the new ones pack the old ones along with them. If we ever really started fresh, it’d mean not having a history anymore. I don’t know how to do that.”

From now on—maybe for a long time, maybe forever—he would wonder about things he hadn’t before. He was resentful, even angry, that his faith had been shaken.

“I may,” Holden said, “be a small, petty person. But if I’m going to lose her, I at least need to know why.”

“The frontier always outpaces the law,”

That was the danger of being old and a politician. Habits outlived the situations that created them. Policies remained in place after the situations that inspired them had changed.

“Now you’re asking me to explain microwaves to a monkey.”

the Church of Humanity Ascendant, a religion that eschewed supernaturalism in all forms, and whose theology boiled down to Humans can be better than they are, so let’s do that

“I get it,” Holden said loudly. “It’s a shitty and uncomfortable hiding spot. You have my permission to now shut up about that.”

Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he’d ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of.

“Discrimen,” they called it—an instant of perilous and excruciating tension, when the achievements of an entire lifetime might hang in the balance.