"When I completed three and a half years in that town, I noticed that the left hand thumb of my wife was swelling out as if it was a buoy, but it did not pain her. One day, she followed me to the farm in which I was tapping the palm-wine, and to my surprise when the thumb that swelled out touched a palm-tree throne, the thumb bust out suddenly and there we saw a male child came out of it and at the same time that the child came out from the thumb, he began to talk to us as if he was ten years of age.”"

"As we sat down under this tree and were thinking about that night’s danger, there we saw a ‘Spirit of Prey’, he was big as a hippopotamus, but he was walking upright as a human-being; his both legs had two feet and tripled his body, his head was just like a lion’s head and every part of his body was covered with hard scales, each of these scales was the same in size as a shovel or hoe, and all curved towards his body.”"

"The expression of the life-force which forms one’s personality, and which remains even in the deads after they have become non-living."

"Alo is a lie!"

"Read any history of first contact between civilizations. Even if those in power on the weaker side are able to fight back, there are always those who turn traitor and support the invaders. They are the Luministes in the picture, they sell their own people into submission to gain power under the invader."

"Am I alive? Death seems so hard to pin down in this century."

"People like tradition and certainty, especially when the world around them is changing so fast."

"As an amateur historian I think it’s the same, century after century: same shit, different flies."

"Paparazzi were loitering in increasing numbers with their high-tech cameras and intrusion drones, a sure sign that a scandal was suspected."

"Laws are meant to work, not just be kept for their own sake."

"MARKS: It’s not fair. MARKS: Evolution isn’t about being fair. It’s about adapting to changing circumstances."

"Our ship has sunk and now we try to rebuild it out of driftwood."

"But haven’t you heard? We’re in a collapsing climate disaster. The Zone’s just one part of it. Collapsing as in, all our usable biomes crunching together as the heat pushes out from the equator. And you’ve all seen how that goes. Everything wants to live. People move north and south, animals move north and south, diseases move north and south. Waves of epidemics as all those people and animals and microbes mix in new configurations. Every year a new wave of hospitalisations from some fresh plague that’s mutating to survive the conditions we’re imposing on the world."

"That project was already well underway when I first came to the Zone. Hidden in all the budgetary overspends and the trees. But I became a part of it. And as for Why? When a conglomerate of future-minded corporations gives you a bottomless well of untraceable funds and a team of top scientists with no scruples at all, it becomes all very, Because it’s there."

"By all means, go up to the surface and have the run of the Zone, Doctor Marks. Pit the indefatigability of your human spirit against the planet. See how that goes for you."

"There is no more dangerous enemy than one who despises learning."

"I’m telling it now. And I’m trying to remember how it actually was. Not just how I remember remembering it. But memory is a hard disk that overwrites itself constantly."

"Aunt Charla is one of those people who take pride in not knowing about anything that’s changed in the world in the last thirty years."

"The emergent ecologies that were recolonising the place were very light on mammals and birds. You got little ones, mostly nocturnal even when their ancestors had been diurnal. The big winners were amphibians, reptiles, bugs. Because hot and damp works for ectotherms."

"I am nothing but a scientist of sufficiently advanced technology, which is to say a magician."

"Just because I did good doesn’t mean I don’t feel bad, because the feeling bad, it’s not particularly because of anything that’s happened, it’s just the way I’m wired."

"Memory is fallible. Dreams overwrite the reality, fond fantasies inform the dreams."

"I’m the expert, God help us all."

"And wasn’t the planet supposed to die? Wasn’t that the deal about human-generated climate change? That the world was supposed to predecease us? I mean, that certainly seemed to be what we’d agree to. That, okay, we’d destroy everything, but that was fine just so long as the last thing to get destroyed was us. And here's all this. Flourishing. Fucking flourishing in the death zone. Heat-adapted in a way we could never be."

"He seemed dead, but perhaps “dead” meant something different. Perhaps it meant something less permanent."

"Long-term thinking requires a clarity the natural human mind is not good at."

"The place gave a bad name to dingy and escaped being run-down only because it had never been up."

"And I had been manipulated, surely, but an actor, of all people, has no business complaining he has been tricked."

"“Maybe Fillory doesn’t need a god right now. I think this age might just be a godless one.” A Fillory without a god. It was a radical notion. But he thought about it, and it didn’t seem like a terrible one. They would be on their own this time—the kings, the queens, the people, the animals, the spirits, the monsters. They’d have to decide what was right and just and fair for themselves. There would still be magic and wonders and all the rest of it, but they would figure out what to do with them with nobody looking over their shoulders, no divine parent-figure meddling with them and helping or not according to his or her divine mood."

"I admit that you might possibly not be deluding yourself about that."

"Who the fuck is playing that shit? Janet thought. How do they even know what notes to play? Probably it was Written somewhere, probably there’s always been a big alpenhorn somewhere under glass, with a sign that says In case of Ragnarok break glass and play an E flat."

"It was the sound of death, the ultimate irreversible."

"It was ending too soon, the way everything did, everything except Ebola viruses and really bad people like psychopaths. Those things never ended. How was that fair? Fuck it, it was stupid. Theories about life were always bullshit."

"He’d always half expected that the watch would turn out to have some sort of amazing magical power—turning back time, maybe, or slowing it, or freezing it, or something. It certainly looked magical enough. But if it had any powers at all he’d never found them. Funny how some things you’re sure will pay off never do."

"She was starting to suspect that facing up to the nightmare of the past is what gives you the power to build your future."

"“And I think I’ve figured out how. I think I finally know how to fix everything.” “Historically speaking,” Alice said, “when people have said that they’ve almost always been wrong.”"

"But not even the end of the world was going to stop Janet from being a bitch. It was the principle of the thing."

"“How’s it going?” “Pretty well,” Quentin said. “I’m not dead.”"

"Guy lives in a fantasy world without junk food or cars or trans fats or TV and he’s still fat. You had to admire his dedication to the cause."

"That was magic for you, right? The thing about magic, the real kind: it didn’t make excuses, and it was never funny."

"Heads turned. This was gossip of the very first water—pure pharmaceutical-grade gossip."

"It was funny about magic, how messy and imperfect it was. When people said something worked like magic they meant that it cost nothing and did exactly what you wanted it to. But there were lots of things magic couldn’t do. It couldn’t raise the dead. It couldn’t make you happy. He couldn’t make you good-looking. And even with the things it could do, it didn’t always do them right. And it always, always cost something."

"Janet stopped at the very end of the pier and looked around, hands on hips. Everything looked normal. Not a lot of apocalypse going on here. But then swamps already looked like the end of the world anyway. Maximum entropy, land and water commingled chaotically. There wasn’t much further downhill they could go."

"Up through around twenty-five he’d never even thought about his back: it was a balanced, frictionless, self-regulating system. Now it felt like a busted gearbox into which somebody had chucked a handful of sand."

"We each of us on our own found ways to get on without Fillory. The real world was not as fantastical and brightly colored as Fillory, but it was very distracting nonetheless, and if it didn’t contain any pegasi or giants it was absolutely teaming with girls who seemed almost as magical and dangerous. Fillory was sweet, but this world was very savory. It was easy to let Fillory go when every football match and scholarship examination and furtive kiss told you to stop fighting, forget it, let it be, leave it behind."

"Quentin thought about how wrong things had gone. Things so often went wrong. Was it him? Was he making the same mistake over and over again? Or different mistakes? He like to think he was at least making different mistakes."

"One of the secrets Martin must have learned down below the Northern Marsh was how not to care about some things, and there was power in that, the power to live as though his actions had no consequences. It fell to us to witness the consequences, and they were ugly."

"When I look at England now I see a dead place, Rupert. A wasteland. I won’t live in a wasteland. I’d rather die in paradise."

"Now all I can see is how simple he made everything sound. Reading the Fillory books you would think that all one has to do is behave honorably and bravely and all will be well. What a lesson to teach young children. What a way to prepare them for the rest of their lives."