"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that’s why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit."

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

"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."

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

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

"To capture the pawn, threaten the queen."

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"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 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.”"

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"The most fundamental parental urge is the urge to nurture and protect. To grieve for a child is to admit ultimate impotence. You can’t protect what goes into the ground. You can’t tuck a blanket around a grave."

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

"I suppose every decade gets the music it deserves."

"There was no shame, but only graciousness, sun-soaked air, and, at the last, a peace such as the moss knows in the deepening corridors of trees."

"The high Arctic had more snow that year than anyone remembered."

"The tomahawk flickered after her like a stick-thin dwarf doing cartwheels in the air and the stone head made a cracking sound as it struck. She fell instantly, and curiously slowly. Her heavy body made no sound. Her skull was shattered and the haft of the tomahawk stood out like the handle of a spoon from a boiled egg."

"Surgery is speed and decision. A good surgeon saves his trembling till after he's killed the patient when it can do him no harm."

"Infection...is like the wind, it bloweth where it listeth."

"Everything about the girl was like a round of yeasty dough. It cried out to be smoothed or pressed or moulded or lifted or patted or stroked or gathered up or folded."

"He whispered steadily along in this pearly place, but though his steps were steady, a tension had seized him. It was a quivering, high-note vibration rather than a trembling. His flesh did not shake: inside his tightened skin he hummed, making no sound — a silent scream."

"Like a revelation it came to him that it was far, far better to be an Eskimo; that these people didn't know their arse from a hole in the ground, that they had no business here, that his people had lived here and thrived for thousands of years and that they were the People. They were the People and all these were strangers with the habits of children, and they sulked like children because that's what they were. Old Ways were best!"

"How many would die this winter? There'd be a few more babies, but far more piles of stones. The Old Ways were a trap. The ceremonies and the rituals were pegs where living hangs suspended. Mad. Learn ancient, beautiful skills with spear and kayak in order to conquer impossible country, then struggle back to impossible country so you could use the skills you'd learned? Mad. Learn the skills to prove you're a man, and then to prove you're a man run, run, run to where you have to use the skills! Mad. ... To prove yourself a man. To whom? The million dead worked out these skills so they wouldn't die, but they did die, and the hissing of the Northern Lights was wry, accepting laughter. The million dead wouldn't be so foolish a second time."