Adrian

“Sadeq, being human, has fantasies by the dozen, but he doesn’t dare permit himself to succumb to temptation. I’m not dead, he reasons; therefore, how can I be in Paradise? Therefore, this must be a false paradise, a temptation sent to lead me astray. Probably. Unless I am dead, because Allah, peace be unto him, considers a human soul separated from its body to be dead. But if that’s so, isn’t uploading a sin? In which case, this can’t be Paradise because I am a sinner. Besides which, this whole setup is so puerile!”
― Charles Stross, Accelerando

“Tarquinia said, ‘See, you’re a natural.’ Agata took a moment to process the remark for traces of sarcasm. She said, ‘There’s only one downside if I get us back safely.’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘I don’t want anyone believing that they could put their life in my hands.’ ‘Because . . . ?’ ‘I think we’ll all be much safer,’ Agata explained, ‘if everyone around me is so terrified of the prospect of relying on me in an emergency that they work twice as hard to ensure that it never comes to that.’ Tarquinia said, ‘Don’t worry: there’s nothing you can do to rob me of my healthy respect for the possibility that your incompetence will kill me.”
― Greg Egan

“What would you have done in the old days?’ he asked. ‘If you’d been piloting a gnat with this kind of damage?’ ‘Flown it back to a workshop in the Peerless for repairs.’ ‘And if you couldn’t use the engines until the repairs were completed?’ Tarquinia said, ‘Then I’d call someone for a tow. See how a lifetime of experience has prepared me for this moment?”
― Greg Egan

“His eyes widened and he rapidly scanned page after page. There were many photographs, each followed by detailed diagrams of the internal structure of the various neutron stars. They ranged the gamut from very dense stars that were almost black holes to large bloated neutron stars that had a neutron core and a white-dwarf-star exterior. Some of the names were unfamiliar, but others, like the Vela pulsar and the Crab Nebula pulsar, were neutron stars known to the humans. “But the Crab Nebula pulsar is over 3000 light-years away!” Pierre exclaimed to himself. “They would have had to travel faster than the speed of light to have gone there to take those photographs in the past eight hours!” A quick search through the index found the answer. FASTER-THAN-LIGHT PROPULSION—THE CRYPTO-KEY TO THIS SECTION IS ENGRAVED ON A PYRAMID ON THE THIRD MOON OF THE SECOND PLANET OF EPSILON ERIDANI.”
― Robert L. Forward, Dragon's Egg