"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?"

"When next you turn your eyes to the vast reaches of heaven, gentlemen, you would be well advised to remember that not only is it far more magnificent than the human mind can fathom, it is far more subtle. All the universe is permeated, upheld, knit together, conjoined, encompassed, and contained by the Elemental Ether, which we recognise as an all-pervading, responsive, and intelligent field of energy, eternal and inexhaustible, which is nothing less than the ground of our very being and the wellspring of our existence—that which in ages past and present men have been pleased to call God."

"We in our present generation stand on the cusp of a new and glorious dawn when mastery of these energies lies fully within our grasp as secret yields to inquiry, which yields to experimentation, which leads to verification and duplication, which, in the final course, leads to knowledge."

"These dimensions impinge on one another. They touch. They interpenetrate. And where one dimension touches or passes through another, it forms a line of force on the landscape."

"You see, this universe we inhabit is made up of billions of galaxies—literally beyond counting—and this is only one universe."

"Early man recognised these lines of force and marked them out on the landscape with, well, any old thing, really—standing stones, ditches, mounds, tumps, sacred wells, and that sort of thing. And, later on, with churches, market crosses, crossroads, and whatnot."

"A ley line is what might be called a field of force, a trail of telluric energy. There are hundreds of them, perhaps thousands, all over Britain, and they’ve been around since the Stone Age."

"You spend too much time alone, too much time watching television, and too little time cultivating the inner man. You live in a squalid little flat in what is referred to as a no-go zone from which your friends, of whom you see less and less, have all fled for the suburbs long ago with wives and sprogs in tow. You are exceedingly unlucky in love, having invested years in a romantic relationship which, as you know only too well, is neither romantic nor much of a relationship. In short, you have all the social prospects of a garden gnome."

"Here’s to dodgy adventures with disreputable relatives!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"A fresh river in a beautiful meadow Imagined in his mind The good Painter, who would some day paint it"

"Strange, but when he closed his eyes he had an image of the hotel above them restored to its former grandeur. A concierge and porter in the lobby. Someone behind the desk waiting to take his key. Sintra in an evening gown. They’d be about to take a motored vehicle to the opera. The streets would be busy with merchants and people coming home from work. The buildings, the storefronts, would be bright and cheery with lights. Like it had been in those mayfly beautiful moments between wars, before the Rising."

"They’ll never forget, never forgive, no matter who the enemy is, son. Better just to start a new life. Be someone else."

"I had learned so much about the world that I had decided to withdraw from it."

"But the fact is I don’t care. I haven’t cared since I came here, and I will continue not to care until I leave. With as much of Ambergris smoldering behind me as I can manage."

"Who had the bigger burden? The one who had to watch the other person endure or the one who endured?"

"It looked like lively abstract art. Symbols in search of context."

"Maybe once, early on, he had convinced himself he could do some good, sometimes even imagined he was a mole, getting close so he could strike a blow. Imagined he was in it to defend Ambergris from the enemies that surrounded it. Imagined he was protecting ordinary citizens. But the truth was he’d been tired, had stopped caring. Broken down from too much fighting, too many things connected to his past. And when that spark, that impulse, had returned, it was too late: he was trapped."

"When they give you things, ask yourself why. When you're grateful to them for giving you the things you should have anyway, ask yourself why."

"Unlike the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star, the Church of the Seven Pointed Star believed that God had seven points rather than seven edges. Therefore, rather than worshipping the journey toward self-realization symbolized by the edges, they worshipped the goals of self-realization as symbolized by the points. [...] Adherents to the Church of the Seven-pointed Star used swords with sharp points but no edge, while the Cult of the Seven-Edged Star used swords with sharp edges but no point. Alas, edges proved superior to points in most battles fought in the streets of Nicea. Caroline's followers were forced to either commit sacrilege and switch to edges, or become meals for the ever-present saltwater buzzard. Proving, one could say, the point of the edges."

"I could not move or speak for several minutes, frozen in the belief that the book itself had changed and was now writing me."

"It closely resembles the situation that exists within a mental institution: in tight quarters, in similar garb, dissimilar minds attempt to build a consensus reality that, with a monumental effort of empathy, cannot—can never!—take concrete form."

"It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?"

"An inordinate love of ritual can be harmful to the soul, unless, of course, in times of great crisis, when ritual can protect the soul from fracture."

"The city might be savage, stray dogs might share the streets with grimy urchins whose blank eyes reflected the knowledge that they might soon be covered over, blinded forever, by the same two pennies just begged from some gentleman, and no one in the fuming, fulminous boulevards of trade might know who actually ran Ambergris—or, if anyone ran it at all, but, like a renegade clock, it ran on and wound itself heedless, empowered by the insane weight of its own inertia, the weight of its own citizenry."

"It’s always been like this. Every generation finds its own way to show that it isn’t like the one before. Too much risk, too much sex, terrible music, not enough respect for the old ways. This is no different."