Everyone dies—the rearrangement of when is a matter of only statistical interest. - Michael Swanwick

(Information is information, Faust. Knowledge is knowledge. I make no distinction between the high and the low.)

In some ways she was not a very good scientist: impatient with data, too ready to leap to conclusions, apt to judge an idea not by its merits but by its sheer niftiness.

“Your collection is not a woman. That’s only a metaphor—an abstraction! You’ll be dying for nothing, for a principle that nobody else can even comprehend.”
As she spoke, Jane became convinced that she herself would never willingly die for a principle. She might feel guilty about it, but she’d smile and lie, knuckle under, pretend, anything, in order to survive. It made her feel a little sad to realize this, but also, at the same time, very adult.