"After a gaudy sunset that land became an immense, limitless darkness. Too large, Guilford thought, too empty, and too plain a token of the indifferent machinery of God."

"A lot of people have made political careers out of religious piety and the fear of foreigners, but that won’t last. Not enough foreigners or miracles to sustain the crisis."

"Guilford thought he knew what science was. It was nothing more than curiosity...tempered by humility, disciplined with patience. Science meant looking—a special kind of looking. Looking especially hard at the things you didn’t understand. Looking at the stars, say, and not fearing them, not worshiping them, just asking questions, finding the question that would unlock the door to the next question and the question beyond that."

"“Time is a vastness,” he said finally. “We tend to underestimate it.”"

"What was time, after all, except a lead-footed march from the precincts of youth into the country of the grave? Time was the force that crumbled granite, devoured memory, and seduced infants into senility—as implacable as a hanging judge and as poetic as a tank."

"Now as ever, he was startled by the wild exuberance of the twentieth century. All these lights! Colored neon and glaring filaments, powered, he had learned, but mechanical dams spanning rivers hundreds of miles away. And most of this—astonishingly—in the name of advertising."

"“Must be a full moon,” she said.”Lawrence is turning into an asshole.”"

"“There’s no forgiveness built into the system. I told Barbara so, dozens of times. She was always marching off to save the whales, save the trees, save some goddamn thing. It was endearing. But in the back of my head I always heard Dad’s voice: ‘This is only a holding action. Nothing is ever really saved.’ Barbara thought the greenhouse effect was like a virus, something you could stop if you came up with the right vaccine. I told her it was a cancer—the cancer of humanity on the vital organs of the earth. You can’t stop that by marching.” “Isn’t that a little like giving up?” “I think it’s called acceptance.” Archer stood and walked to the door, where his silhouette obscured the motion of the trees. “Very bleak attitude, Tom.” “Experience bears it out.”"

"I pretended to admire the tattoo in the shape of the Greek letter omega that covered her cheeks and forehead. It looked as if a dray horse had kicked her in the face."

"He was not accustomed to thinking about these things so bluntly, but the facts were as obvious as they were painful."

"The past was gone, the dead were dead and did not speak, and everybody dies; one day Oberg would be dead and silent, too, and that was as it should be: the broad and welcoming ocean of oblivion. It made life bearable. It was sacred. It should not be tampered with."

"For them, the idea of forgetting was indistinguishable from the idea of death. To pass out of memory was to pass out of the world. To conserve memory was to confer immortality."

"They allow us access to the experience of the past—the only kind of time machine we are ever likely to have."

"There were times when his life had seemed to him like one prolonged act of sleepwalking."

"He had come out of the war twice-decorated and with a thoughtful respect for the horrors of combat. He had seen terrible things, participated in terrible things...but that was the nature of war, and it was not something you could enter into halfway. War was a state of mind, war was all or nothing."

"It was amazing how these events lost their impact, translated through the flat gaze of a video screen."

"“You think Wexler is lying?” “I think he’s fallible,” Byron had replied."

"Strange, isn’t it, how people cling most desperately to a thing when it becomes least useful to them?"

"Thus it was not money but conscience that had propelled me on this journey. Conscience, that crabbed and ecclesiastical nag, which inevitably spoke, whether I heeded it or not, in a voice much like my mother’s."

"This was unrecorded history, unhappening even as it happened."

"His last thought, as sleep overtook him, was that it was true what Cosimo had said: the universe was far stranger than anyone imagined, or could imagine."

"Certainty sent a sick dread snaking through his gut: he was being stalked."

"“Contrary to what many may think, immortality is not a fairy tale invented to compensate for an unhappy life.”"

"“None of us ever knows what impact we have on the world around us.”"

"“Time is the central mystery of our existence. It confines and defines us in many ways.”"

"The air crackled with the presage of lightning, and a heavy mist descended around them."

"The great hulking eminence of the stone-age mound stood out as an ominous dark shadow."

"It had long been an ambition to find the line of force that might lead to the Holy Land in the time of Christ."

"A favourite saying in China—which she had heard on occasion from her own grandmother—was that the threads of life are easy to weave, but difficult to untangle."

"Little Archie’s story is darker, more desperate, and yet drearily familiar."

"If her hunch was right, the earl’s explorations were connected in some way to ley travel: that peculiar phenomenon that had plucked her from the twenty-first century and dropped her so rudely into the seventeenth."

"Before Egypt, long before travelling to that time and place—or any other—became even a remote possibility, Mina had paid her dues. Haltingly, painstakingly, maddeningly."

"How very bright this empire of stars, he mused. Which poet had said that?"

"Once again he felt the now-familiar tingle on his skin, as when, just before a lightning strike, the air becomes electrically charged."

"I’ve moved heaven and earth to find you."

"You really don’t want to get lost."

"He was a stranger in a strange land: lost in the cosmos, a man with neither compass nor guide, sitting in a tomb in Egypt surrounded by the dead, with Giles—a man his own age, but separated by class and sensibility and four hundred years—looking to him for answers."

"“If the heat doesn’t kill you,” he mused, “the flies surely will.”"

"The very idea of a near-infinite array of universes made his head swim."

"Even well-known words were often pronounced differently and could have unfamiliar meanings; connotations were not fixed, but fluid. Definitions drifted. He was constantly brought up short by the sudden realization that what he thought he had said was not at all what he meant—at least as it had been understood by his hearers. Still, he was coming to grips with the slippery speech, and his confidence was growing."

"Jump blind and you might find yourself on the rim of a raging volcano, or smack in the middle of a battlefield during a savage war, or on a swiftly tilting ice floe in a tempest-tossed sea."

"Getting lost is the least of your worries."

"People did not go jumping from one place to another with nothing in between. It simply did not happen."

"London had vanished. In place of the lively, thrusting metropolitan conurbation was an empty rural wilderness of damp brown fields under low autumnal skies."

"Alea iacta est. The die has been cast."

"See here, if a simple act of kindness or generosity, such as buying a loaf of bread for some poor working women, can mean that wholesale death and destruction will be avoided—why, a man would be a monster who had it in his power to alleviate all that suffering yet stood by and did nothing."

"You’re changing the course of history. I thought that sort of thing was strictly forbidden."

"But isn’t that hazardous—messing with events?"