She had impressed him as capable of behaviour even more meaningless than most human beings. He had watched her kill her own people with a ferocity th… - M. John Harrison

People think it’s a failure to live alone. But it isn’t. The failure is to live with someone because you can’t face anything else.

They were arrant newcomers, driven by the nouveau enthusiasms of a cowboy economy. They had no idea what they had come for, or how to get it: they only knew they would. They had no idea how to comport themselves. They sensed there was money to be made. They dived right in. They started wars. They stunned into passivity five of the alien races they found in possession of the galaxy and fought the sixth—which they called “the Nastic” out of a mistranslation of the Nastic’s word for “space”—to a wary truce. After that they fought one another.

Anna accumulated things as a way of insulating herself against her own thoughts.