The Ginger Star (1974)

All page numbers are from the mass market paperback first edition published by Ballantine Books ISBN 0-345-23963-6

• With any luck. Stark smiled cynically. Not that he did not believe in luck. Rather, he had found it to be an uncertain ally.
  • Chapter 3 (p. 18)

• The man who doesn’t fear, doesn’t live long. I fear everything.
  • Chapter 5 (p. 32)

• There was a smell in the air now. The hot, close, frightening small of mob; mob excited, hungry, dreaming blood and death. The primitive in Stark knew that sweaty acridity all too well.
  • Chapter 7 (p. 45)

• The mountains dwindled away into hills covered with a dark, stunted scrub. Beyond them the land flattened out to the horizon, a treeless immensity of white and gray-green, a spongy mossiness flecked with a million icy ponds. The wind blew, sometimes hard, sometimes harder.
  • Chapter 10 (p. 63)

• I can’t tell you if the stories are true. Men lie without meaning to. They talk as if they had been part of a thing that happened to someone they never knew and only heard of by sixth remove.
  • Chapter 10 (p. 65)

• “Better to make haste slowly than not at all,” said Amnir sententiously.
  • Chapter 11 (p. 74)

• Stark did not like them. There was a touch of madness in them, born of the long dark and the too-long-held faith.
  • Chapter 15 (p. 102)

• The Thyrans came on, as merciless as time.
  • Chapter 19 (p. 125)

• Stark said wearily, “I don’t think you understand.” Normally he was tolerant of tribal fancies, but he felt no great tenderness for the Outdwellers. “The stars are already defiled. They’re only suns, like that one over your head. They have worlds around them, like this one under your feet. People live on those worlds, people who never heard of Outdwellers or their footling goddess. And the starships fly between them. It’s all going on out there, this second as you stand here, and nothing you can do will stop it.”
  • Chapter 15 (pp. 126-127)

• “Aren’t you even curious?” he asked. “A million worlds out there with more wonders than I could tell you in a million years, and you don’t even want to ask a question?”
  • Chapter 15 (p. 128)

• Under the attentiveness was fear, and something else. Anger, hate—the instinctive rejection of an intolerable truth.
  • Chapter 22 (p. 149)

• Invisibility is a condition of godhead. If folk could see them, they would know the truth, and the Lords Protector would cease to be divine.
  • Chapter 22 (p. 151)