People From Toronto

"Since Deacon Hollingshead’s arrival in town last July the Dominion had been hard at work, cleansing New York City of moral corruption. “Corruption” is a popular word with the enthusiasts of the Dominion, usually uttered as a prelude to the knife, the docket, or the noose."

"Sandra had spent her days rendering pass/fail verdicts over troubled minds, applying tests most functional adults easily passed. Is the subject oriented to time and place? Does the subject understand the consequences of his actions? But if she could give the same test to humanity as a whole, Sandra thought, the outcome would be very much in doubt. Subject is confused and often self-destructive. Subject pursues short-term gratification at the expense of his own well-being."

"“Perpetual peace is a dream,” he said, “as much as we may yearn for it—but war! War is an integral part of God’s ordering of the universe, without which the world would be swamped in selfishness and materialism. War is the very vessel of honor, and who of us could endure a world without the divine folly of honor? That faith is especially true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause he little understands, during a campaign of which he has little notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use. On the field of battle, where a man lives or dies by the caprice of a bullet or the verdict of a bayonet, life is at its best and healthiest.”"

"“Bloody indeed,” the President said. “But we’re not a nation that flinches at blood, nor are we a people constrained by feminine delicacy. To us all is permitted—even cruelty, yes, even ruthlessness—for we’re the first in the world to raise the sword not in the name of enslaving and oppressing anyone, but in the name of freeing them from bondage. We must not be miserly with blood! Let there be blood, if blood alone can drown the old secular world. Let there be pain, and let there be death, if pain and death will save us from the twin tyrannies of Atheism and Europe.”"

"I suppose the pursuit of fashion has always carried a price, monetary or otherwise."

"A man who submits himself wholeheartedly to God might handle them and not be harmed. That was the faith my father had professed. Certainly he trusted God, in his own case, and believed God manifested Himself in the rolled eyes of his congregants and in their babble of incomprehensible tongues. Trust and be saved, was his philosophy. And yet in the end it was the snakes that killed him. I wondered which element of the calculation had ultimately failed him—human faith or divine patience."

"The rooms were confining, the windows minuscule, the ceilings perilously low. She could not have spent much money on the furnishings, which were shabby, threadbare, nicked, and splintered—I had seen better furniture abandoned at Montreal curbsides. But if her book-cases were humble, they were bowed under the weight of surprisingly many books—almost as many as there had been in the library of the Duncan and Crowley Estate back in Williams Ford. It seemed to me a treasure more estimable than any fine sofa or plush footstool, and worth all the rough economies surrounding it."

"“Truth is a perilous commodity,” Julian admitted, “but so is ignorance, Adam—more so.”"

"Julian read the Bible as if it were a work of contemporary fiction, open to criticism or even revision. Once, when I queried him about the purpose of his unusual reinterpretations, he said to me, “I want a better Bible, Adam. I want a Bible in which the Fruit of Knowledge contains the Seeds of Wisdom, and makes life more pleasurable for mankind, not worse. I want a Bible in which Isaac leaps up from the sacrificial stone and chokes the life out of Abraham, to punish him for the abject and bloody sin of Obedience. I want a Bible in which Lazarus is dead and stubborn about it, rather than standing to attention at the beck and call of every passing Messiah.”"

"The Dutch at close proximity looked much like Americans, apart from their peculiar uniforms, and so it was their uniforms I fired at, half convinced that I was killing, not human beings, but enemy costumes, which had borne their contents here from a distant land; and if some living man suffered for his enslavement to the uniform, or was penetrated by the bullets aimed at it—well, that was unavoidable, and the fault couldn’t be placed at my feet. The private charade was not equivalent to Courage, but it enabled a Callousness that served a similar purpose."

"To fire a bullet into the heart or brains of one’s fellow man—even a fellow man striving to do the same to you—creates what might be called an unassimilable memory: a memory that floats on daily life the way an oil stain floats on rainwater. Stir the rain barrel, scatter the oil into countless drops, disperse it all you like, but it will not mix; and eventually the slick comes back, as loathsomely intact as it ever was."

"Evolution can’t be predicted, Julian used to tell me; it’s a scattershot business; it fires, but it doesn’t aim."

"If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it’s because I'm also a realist."

"I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents—conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting."

"These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries—that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth’s reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers."

"We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father’s unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars."

"I would confront the thieves, I thought, and the self-evident justice of my case would cause them to crumble before me. I don't know why I expected such extravagant results from the application of mere justice. That kind of calculation is seldom borne out by worldly events."

"Average people seldom talked about anything interesting and often hurt each other savagely."

"Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind—and some you carry with you, world without end."

"The village muezzin called the faithful to prayer. Diane ignored the sound."

"What we cannot remember, we must rediscover."

"You must not make the mistake of thinking that because nothing lasts, nothing matters."

"We’ll do what life always does—defy expectations."

"“You learning anything from this?” Tyrell asked. Turk stood up and brushed his hands. “Yeah. I'm learning that I know even less than I thought I did.”"

"Don’t be upset. The world is full of surprises. We’re all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we’re seldom formally introduced."

"His eyes were closed, shut tight on whatever battle his common sense was conducting with his faith."

"“It never fails to astonish me,” Carol said. “The tenacity of love.”"

"“When was it obvious she was ill?” “Weeks ago. Or maybe—looking back on it—well—months.” “Has she had any kind of medical attention?” Pause. “Simon?” “No.” “Why not?” “It didn’t seem necessary.” “It didn’t seem necessary?” “Pastor Dan wouldn’t allow it.” I thought: And did you tell Pastor Dan to go fuck himself?"

"[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them."

"An honest book is almost as good as a friend."

"He rolled his eyes. “Those are things people say, Tyler. Talking about multilateralism and diplomacy is like saying ‘I love you’—it serves to facilitate the fucking."

"I loved Molly. Or at least I told myself I did. Or, if what I felt for her was not love, it was at least a plausible imitation, a convincing substitute."

"There’s no drug that’ll make a stupid man smart."

"It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel’s ass."

"I don’t believe money is evil, but it can be terribly corrosive."

"The suicidally disgruntled were legion, And their enemies included any and all Americans, Brits, Canadians, Danes, et cetera; or, conversely, all Moslems, dark-skinned people, non-English-speakers, immigrants; all Catholics, fundamentalists, atheists; all liberals, all conservatives...For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape."

"All the brands and flavors of Big Salvation. At the last minute we would devise a technological fix and save ourselves. Or: the Hypotheticals were benevolent beings who would turn the planet into a peaceable kingdom. Or: God would rescue us all, or at least the true believers among us. Or. Or. Or. Big Salvation. It was a honeyed lie. A paper lifeboat, even if we were killing ourselves trying to cling to it. It wasn’t the Spin that had mutilated my generation. It was the lure and price of Big Salvation."

"Along with a dozen other students I had dissected a human cadaver and sorted its contents by size, color, function, and weight. There was nothing pleasant about the experience. Its only consolation was its truth and its only virtue was its utility."

"The world is what it is and won’t be bargained with."

"Everybody falls, and we all land somewhere."

"This would have been less annoying had it been untrue."

"His fertility cycles meant little to him. In his lifetime, he knew, he might make only one or two real contributions to the City’s genetic continuity, his viral gametes combining with others in the bodies of the night feeders to become morphologically active. It was abstractly pleasing, though, to realize he had cast his own essence into the ocean of probability, where it might come floating back unknown to him, as a fresh citizen with new and unique ideas and odors."

"Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change."

"He’s exactly what she wants. He’s the last thing she needs."

"“We might have destroyed ourselves, but at least it would have been our own fault.” “Would it, though? Whose fault exactly? Yours? Mine? No, it would have been the result of several billion human beings making relatively innocuous choices: to have kids, drive a car to work, keep their job, solve the short-term problems first. When you reach the point at which even the most trivial acts are punishable by the death of the species, then obviously, obviously, you’re at a critical juncture, a different kind of point of no return.”"

"Fortune had done him few favors in the past, and he wasn’t sure he trusted it."

"She gave me a disdainful look. “Please don’t make facile judgments about things you don’t understand.”"

"I want them not to forget. Which is, I suppose, what all aged veterans want. But they’ll forget. Of course they will. And their children will know less of us than they do, and their children’s children will find us barely imaginable. Which is as it should be. You can’t stop time."

"It was possible at last to hear the silence—to appreciate that there was a silence, deep and potent, out there beyond the pretension of the light."

"When does loyalty become martyrdom?"