“The old man was sad as he sat on his porch. He knew so little of the Great Purpose. Why must his seed fling itself starward? He knew that it must — but he lacked a reason. His grandchildren played in the twilight, played space-games, although there was not yet a starship on the planet.”
“There is a difference between tragedy and blind brutal calamity. Tragedy has meaning, and there is dignity in it. Tragedy stands with its shoulders stiff and proud. But there is no meaning, no dignity, no fulfillment, in the death of a child.”
“Whatever you specialize in, another specialty will either gobble you, or find a way to replace you. If you get what looks like a secure niche, somebody'll come along and wall you up in it and write your epitaph on it. And the more specialized a society gets, the more dangerous it is for the pure specialist. You think an electronic engineer in any safer than an actor? Or a ditch-digger?”
“Encounters between strangers in the desert, while rare, were occasions of mutual suspicion, and masked by initial preparations on both sides for an incident that might prove either cordial or warlike.”
“From the lightning and the tempest,O Lord, deliver us.From the scourge of the earthquake,O Lord, deliver us.From plague, famine, and war,O Lord, deliver us.From the place of ground zero,O Lord, deliver us.From the rain of the cobalt,O Lord, deliver us.From the rain of the strontium,O Lord, deliver us.From the fall of the cesium,O Lord, deliver us.From the curse of the Fallout,O Lord, deliver us.From the begetting of monsters,O Lord, deliver us.From the curse of the Misborn,O Lord deliver us.”
“How easy it would have been flatly to have told the boy that his pilgrim was only an old tramp of some kind, and then to have commanded him not to think otherwise. But by allowing the boy to see that a question was possible, he had rendered such a command ineffective before he uttered it. Insofar as thought could be governed at all, it could only be commanded to follow what reason affirmed anyhow; command it otherwise, and it would not obey.”