Gellaho's Audiobook Extravaganza

When the person who's in front of you in the line waiting to get aboard the ship suddenly turns into a swarm of bugs and gets incinerated by a plasma blast on wide dispersal that passes by so close you get a tan, it's a little hard to acccept being told, "It's nothing, don't worry, just keep the line moving."

"The pasteel polymer tape around my chest felt tight, which was the general idea."

"I felt as if I were some kind of remote probe being ssent into unexplored territory to record as much information as possible before the hostile environment destroyed me."

"No, of course I didn't know," he said. "If I *had* known, then they would have known that I knew and they would also have known *how* I knew, and then they would have known that the Nomads knew, and the Nomads did not want them to know that."

"I wondered which moron had decided that the Nomads were not as intelligent as we were. Breck was right; we never learn."

"In fact, the idea of the mind 'going boom' raised a very nasty question - could that happen *literally*?"

"She reappeared by the time Higgins had the fire going, threw down the freshly killed carcass of a creature that looked like a cross between a small antelope and a hairy mountain goat, and imperiously departed once again somewhere off into the darkness, where she wouldn't have to witness the distasteful spectacle of males eating, and ruining perfectly good flesh by roasting it. I was beginning to feel seriously inadequate."

"There was an incredible sound, like hundreds of walnuts cracking, and moments later, they had burrowed back down beneath the surface, leaving nothing behind. Not even bones."

"There could be thousands of miles of virgin, unpopulated country available all around us, and yet most of us always gravitated to the skyscrapers and the slums, the concrete and the steel, the pulsating, sweating, heaving multitudes choking in their own effluvium, pressing in on one another, living like insects in a hive, all for the illusion of security and fellowship. The city made its own rules and forgot about the rules of nature. It became a ravening beast, its pulse abnormally fast, its reactions unnatural, its sexuality perverse, its mind twisted. When there are too many ants in a colony, they all go mad. The loneliest, saddest people I've met have always lived in cities."

"Gil Cavanaugh was a very angry man. He was also a very big man, with a face like a russet potato, wide and ruddy, the sort of face on which every thought and emotion were plainly written. I didn't think it looked like the face of a saboteur."

"'Well, I've only mated with Tyla once and it almost crippled me,' Higgins said matter-of-factly, as only a scientist could. 'I still have the scars. Since then, as a matter of self-preservation, our relationship has been essentially platonic.'"

"Purgatory. Just the mention of the name was enough to make my stomach start contracting."

"It's only natural to want people to like you, to accept you for who and what you are, but you want it on your terms. You want to be able to decide how much of yourself you're going to reveal at any given time and you want to control how close you're going to let other people get. Psychos didn't really get to do that."

"It's hard enough being a psycho without having a paranoid looking over your shoulder all the time."