People From Los Angeles

"“Ah, books.” Ziegler, smiling, came up behind me. “They bob like corks on an ocean. Float between worlds, messages in bottles.”"

"We contrast the urban and the natural, but that’s a contemporary myth. We’re animals, after all; our cities are organic products, fully as “natural” (whatever that word really means) as a termite hill or a rabbit warren. But how much more interesting: how much more complex, dressed in the intricacies and exfoliations of human culture, simple patterns iterated into infinite variation. And full of secrets, secrets beyond counting."

"You have a knack for turning your eyes inside out, so you see them. And they see you. And you're afraid, because they’re from the uncreated future, from a place, I think, where the human race has reached its last incarnation, from the end of the material world. Perhaps the end of all worlds. And they’re sad—melancholy is the better word—because you're like an angel to them, the angel of the past, the angel of infinite possibility. Possibility lost. The road not taken."

"One doesn’t have to understand in order to look. One has to look, in order to understand."

"“Don’t tell me. It changed your life.” I was smiling. She smiled back. “It didn’t even change my mind.”"

"The attacking piece displaces its victim. The vanquished piece leaves the plane of the board entirely. But it does not, in a higher sense, cease to exist."

"To capture the pawn, threaten the queen."

"Ziegler said, “You know the story in the Bible, the story of Abraham and Isaac?” “Of course.” “God instructs Abraham to offer his son as a sacrifice. Isaac makes it as far as the chopping block before God changes his mind.” Yes. Jacob had always imagined God a little appalled at Abraham’s willingness to cooperate. Ziegler said, “What’s the moral of the story?” “Faith.” “Hardly,” Ziegler said. “Faith has nothing to do with it. Abraham never doubted the existence of God—how could he? The evidence was ample. His virtue wasn’t faith, it was fealty. He was so simplemindedly loyal that he would commit even this awful, terrible act. He was the perfect foot soldier. The ideal pawn. Abraham’s lesson: fealty is rewarded. Not morality. The fable makes morality contingent. Don’t go around killing innocent people, that is, unless you're absolutely certain God want you to. It’s a lunatic’s credo. “Isaac, on the other hand, learns something much more interesting. He learns that neither God nor his own father can be trusted. Maybe it makes him a better man than Abraham. Suppose Isaac grows up and fathers a child of his own, and God approaches him and makes the same demand. One imagines Isaac saying, ’No. You can take him if you must, but I won’t slaughter my son for you.’ He’s not the good and faithful servant his father was. But he is, perhaps, a more wholesome human being.”"

"“Goddamn you,” Jacob said. “There’s no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.”"

"The awful thing about lying was that it became a habit, then a reflex, as automatic as the blinking of the eyes or the voiding of the bowels. Lying was the Terrestrial disease, his mother used to say."

"And death? I don’t fear death. I dread the absence of it."

"Life invented it first, Zoe thought, like so many other things. Like eyes: Turning photon impacts into neurochemical events with such subtlety that a frog can target a fly and a man can admire a rose."

"Ecstasy hates company."

"A broken human being isn’t even a good tool."

"Perfect aristocratic tone, Degrandpre thought: insult and menace in a single phrase."

"“The planet doesn’t hate you,” Theo had once said. “But its intimacies are fatal.”"

"She understood too much. She understood that she had reached her destiny point, that time and the circumstances of her life had conspired to bring her to this place. For one ecstatic moment she was the axis on which the stars revolved."

"Last week the doctor at the Tilson Rural Clinic had shown him his X-rays, the too-easy-to-interpret shadows on his liver and lungs. Guilford had declined an offer of surgery and and last-gasp radiation therapy. This horse was too old to beat."

"He hated the idea of eulogizing himself. Some tasks are best left to others, surely including obituaries."

"That worries me. One death is attrition; two would look like incompetence—on someone’s part."

"Zoe slowed but didn’t stop. She kept her hands in front of her, still a judicious distance from the animal. But close enough to smell it. Close enough to see the steam rising from its warm underbelly into the night air. Four billion years of un-Earthly evolution had shaped this aggregate of cells, this beast. She looked at it. And, amazingly, it looked at her. An impossible distance from the planet of her birth, this miracle had happened: Clay had made life. Life regarded life. First light, Zoe thought."

"He was as alone as he had ever been, frighteningly alone, in a borderless land of shaded forests and rocky, abyssal gorges. But that was all right. He didn’t much mind being alone. It was what happened when people were around that worried him."

"The essence of life is change, he said, and the essence of eternal life is eternal change."

"But really, who do you think we’re working for? Not some Sunday school god, not the proverbial loving shepherd. The shoving leopard, more like."

"I gather we’re not the most craven species in the galaxy, but we’re not the most angelic by a long shot."

"“Consciousness,” according to current scientific thought, was something the higher mammals had evolved in order to help them reproduce, much the way a garden slug secretes slime. It had no special ontological status. The “self” was a genetically modulated and biologically useful illusion."

"Here was the real horror, Degrandpre thought, this breaking of barriers. Civilization, after all, was the making of divisions, of walls and fences to parse the chaotic wild into ordered cells of human imagination. Wilderness invades the garden and reason is overthrown."

"I won’t put my ignorance on an altar and call it God."

"“Maybe you were better off not knowing.” “Ignorance is not bliss.”"

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"“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.”"

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"I don’t plan ever to get old. It’s unseemly."

"Lada saw me as a diamond-in-the-rough, begging for her lapidary attention. While I saw her as an ultimately inscrutable amalgam of love, sex, and money. It worked out about as well as you’d expect."

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

"The Mysteries are the Mysteries, and ultimately personal—maybe the most personal thing in the universe. Evangelism, in my opinion, is a failure of the imagination. Beware of prophets: the best visions are the ones they leave in the desert."