Alexander Shmid

“Read you,’ replied Dallas. Thinking of mine shafts, he asked, ‘Any change in your surroundings? Still the same stuff walling the shaft?’ ‘Far as I can see. How am I doing on line?’ A brief pause while Dallas checked the cable remaining on the spool. ‘Fine. Got over fifty metres left. If the shaft runs deeper than that we’ll have to call this off until we can bring bigger stuff from the ship. I wouldn’t think it’d go that far down, though.’ ‘What makes you think so?’ Dallas sounded thoughtful. ‘Would make the ship all out of proportion.’ ‘Proportion to what? And to whose ideas of proportion?’ Dallas did not have a reply for that.”
― Alan Dean Foster, Alien

“The trouble with computers, she thought, was that they had no intuitive senses. Only deductive ones. You had to ask the right question.”
― Alan Dean Foster, Alien

“This is the deep-space commercial tug Nostromo, registration number one eight zero, two four six, en route to Earth with bulk cargo crude petroleum and appropriate refinery. Calling Antarctica traffic control. Do you read me? Over.”
― Alan Dean Foster, Alien

“Curiosity, after all, was what had driven mankind out from his isolated, unimportant world and across the gulf between the stars. It had also, he thoughtfully reminded himself, killed the figurative cat.”
― Alan Dean Foster, Alien