Caleb Mattson

“I'll say this for Captain Deladrier: they don't make any better pilots. A rendezvous, boat to ship in orbit, is precisely calculated. I don't know how, but it is, and you don't change it. You can't.
Only she did. She saw in her scope that the boat had failed to blast on time; she braked back, picked up speed again--and matched and took us in, just by eyes and touch, no time to compute it. If the Almighty ever needs an assistant to keep the stars in their courses, I know where he can look.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers

“That’s exactly what’s going on: that a handful of individuals too few to make a party and incapable of winning votes in debate thinks it can wear down the majority by terror…it’s the peace under assault, it’s our freedom under assault, and every one of these attacks, no matter how motivated, makes the lawful rest of us that much more certain we don’t want killers in charge of our lives and damned well don’t want their advice on how to conduct our affairs.”
― C.J. Cherryh, Cyteen

“The branch where you're having a bad day and keep the extra change is one that split off in the past; your actions can't affect it anymore. But if you act compassionately in this branch, that's still meaningful, because it has an affect on the branches that will split off in the future. The more often you make compassionate choices, the less likely it is that you'll be making selfish choices in the future, even in the branches where you're having a bad day.'

'That sounds good, but--' Nat thought about how years of acting a certain way could wear ruts in a person's brain, so that they would keep slipping into the same habits without trying to. 'But it's not easy,' said Nat.

'I know it's not,' said Dana. 'But the question was, given that we know about other branches, whether making good choices is worth doing. I think it absolutely is. None of us are saints, but we can all try to be better. Each time you do something generous, you're shaping yourself into someone who's more likely to be generous next time, and that matters.”
― Ted Chiang, Exhalation

“He too had watched as the outer limits of his life had narrowed from the world at large, to the island of Manhattan, to that book-lined office in which he awaited with a philosophical resignation the closing of the finger and thumb. And then this... This! A little boy from Nebraska appears at his doorstep with a gentle demeanor and a fantastical tale. A tale not from a leather-bound tome mind you... But from life itself. How easily we forget-we in the business of storytelling- that life was the point all along.”
― Amor Towles, The Lincoln Highway