Clergyman's

Thirty spokes unite at the single hub;
It is the empty space which makes the wheel useful.
Mold clay to form a bowl;
It is the empty space which makes the bowl useful.
Cut out windows and doors;
It is the empty space which makes the room useful.
- Laozi

Here we are, sixty something human minds. We’ve been migrated—while still awake—right out of our own heads using an amazing combination of nanotechnology and electron spin resonance mapping, and we’re now running as software in an operating system designed to virtualize multiple physics models and provide a simulation of reality that doesn’t let us go mad from sensory deprivation! And this whole package is about the size of a fingertip, crammed into a starship the size of your grandmother’s old Walkman, in orbit around a brown dwarf just over three light-years from home, on its way to plug into a network router created by incredibly ancient alien intelligences, and you can tell me that the idea of a fundamental change in the human condition is nonsense?
- Charles Stross

and my pack so light I’m sure I’ve left something behind—but only my worry, and only for a moment.
— Jameson Fitzpatrick

The only life worth living is the one we take responsibility for choosing.
— Alexandra Stoddard

it is now only in letters I write what I feel: not in literature any more, and I seldom say it, because I keep trying to be amusing.
- E. M. Forster

Really now: If you can't get me my newspaper on time, how can you expect me to refrain from killing people?
— Jeff Lindsay

In tactics, action is the governing rule of war.
- Ferdinand Foch

He was persuaded he could know no happiness but in the society of one with whom he could for ever indulge the melancholy that had taken possession of his soul.
— Horace Walpole