What are some of your favorite lines from science fiction?
Here are some of mine:
Our lives are not our own, but by God, we must behave as if they are. When I was young, what I did seemed too small to be of any consequence; but the shiver of dust, we are told, expands in time to the planet-sweeping storm. -Greg Bear, Moving Mars
No matter what I said they insisted on thinking of God as something outside themselves. Something that yearns to take every indolent moron to His breast and comfort him. The notion that the effort has to be their own...and that the trouble they are in is all their own doing...is one that they can't or won't entertain. -Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
I am all that I grok. -Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein
Humor is the ovum of dissent. -Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
To be is to be perceived, and so to know thyself is only possible through the eyes of the other. The nature of our immortal lives is in the consequences of our words and deeds, that go on apportioning themselves throughout all time. Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb we are bound to others, past and present. And by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future. -Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
Look at the pattern this seashell makes. The dappled whorl, curving inward to infinity. That's the shape of the universe itself. There's a constant pressure, pushing toward pattern. A tendency in matter to evolve into ever more complex forms. It's a kind of pattern gravity, a holy greening power we call viriditas, and it is the driving force in the cosmos. Life, you see. -Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson
Remarkably, I just noticed that "our lives are not our own" commonality in the Cloud Atlas and Moving Mars quotes which I read over twenty years apart.