"How to say it? How to say that they alone in all that rocky world were alice, their faces glowing like paper lanterns in the light? How to say that even if living creatures were no more than carriers for ruthless genes, this was still somehow better than the blank mineral nothingness of everything else?" - Part 1, page 6.

"You can't keep Mars for yourselves, John, it's not a scientific station anymore, and you're not going to get a treaty that makes it one." - Part 1, page 16.

"We have been sent here by our governments, and all of our governments are flawed, most of them, disastrously...Now we are on our own, and I for one have no intention of repeating all of Earth's mistakes just because of conventional thinking." - Part 2, page 61.

"Anything was possible, anything could happen - in that sense they were, in just these last...