"We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the …"

"Yes, their cities are good. They knew how to blend art into their living. It’s always been a thing apart for American…"

"They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn’t try too hard to be all men and no animal. Th…"

"…at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of…"

"It was more possible that the human race possessed some spark of divinity that was worth cultivating than that a myst…"

"We were content to be undisturbed in our little backwater, Union Grove, Washington County, in a place once called the…"

"I had one of those steel thermal mugs you carried everywhere with you as a kind of signifier of how busy, and therefo…"

"In the early twenty-first century farming had all but died out here. We got our food from the supermarket, and not ev…"

"We lived more by the sun than by the clock, but I did own a clock. It was an eight-day windup console clock which I k…"

"Living by the clock was an old habit that died hard. Not much that we did required punctuality, but people still want…"