Outis

“I hate it!" he said. "I don't want to be human anymore."
"Neither do I," she said. "It's not a good place to be.”
― Walter Jon Williams, Aristoi

“The effort mined a core of dizziness inside him. He resisted it, but then realizing that there was nothing attractive about consciousness, nothing he cared to know about the someone in charge of death and butterflies, he let himself go spiraling down past layers of darkness and shining wings, darkness and mystical light, and a memory of pain so bright that it became a white darkness wherein he lost all track of being.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“The scene was horrid, yet it had the purity of a stanza from a ballad come to life, a ballad composed about tragic events in some border hell.”
― Lucius Shepard, Life During Wartime

“It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.”
― Alastair Reynolds, Revelation Space