“Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them.”

“A truth should exist, it should not be used like this. If I love you is that a fact or a weapon?”

“Truly amazing, what people can get used to, as long as there are a few compensations.”

“Glenn used to say the reason you can't really imagine yourself being dead was that as soon as you say, 'I'll be dead,' you've said the word I, and so you're still alive inside the sentence....”

“This thing I'm doing can hardly be called living. Instead I'm lying dormant, like a bacterium in a glacier. Getting time over with. That's all.”

“So we couldn't mingle with them, but we could eavesdrop. We got our knowledge that way--we caught it like germs.”

“They told us to depend on memory, because nothing written down could be relied on. The Spirit travels from mouth to mouth, not from thing to thing: books could be burnt, paper crumbles away,...”

“Nature full strength is more than we can take, Adam One used to say. It's a potent hallucinogen, a soporific, for the untrained Soul. We're no longer at home in it. We need to dilute it. We...”

“I don't know how long all of that lasted because time was like rubber, it stretched out like a long, long elastic rope or a huge piece of chewing gum. Then it snapped shut into a tiny black...”