“I think about something I once heard on the radio. About Abraham and Isaac.""I was afraid you'd say something like that." "You asked.""So what about them? I don't really know much about that kind of stuff.""There was a pastor on the radio who said nobody should ever preach that story. Do you remember how it goes? God tells Abraham that he has to sacrifice his son to prove his faith.""I agree with the pastor. It sounds like a sick story. Ban that shit.""But isn't that exactly what we do? Send young men off to a war in the desert and ask them to sacrifice themselves for a belief?”

“Right now there's a commonly-held view among scientists that we know about only four percent of all the matter in the universe. Four percent!""So what about the other 96 percent?""We astrophysicists call it 'dark matter' and 'dark energy.' Maybe we should just call it ignorance. There's so much that we don't know. It's shocking how little we know. And yet we behave like little gods who think we're in control of everything. Like kids with delusions of grandeur. Isn't that what we've made ourselves into? It's as if we're trying to make ourselves believe that four percent is all there is. That everything else, all that we don't know, doesn't exist. But it does. We know it's there; we just don't understand it.”

“The biggest mistake we can make is to think that we've figured the whole thing out. The people I know who are the greatest skeptics, who are least certain about how the world and the universe works, are also the most intelligent.... Absolute certainty is only for stupid people. It requires a certain intelligence for us to realize how little we actually know.”

“I like the idea of it. Just look at the world around you. Wars, terror, starvation, poverty, disease. Take the Middle East conflict, for example. An area on earth that contains so much hatred, so many frustrations, that a bomber is always lurking around the next corner, and where checkpoints and walls have become a permanent part of daily life. When I look at such a world from here in my little Danish ivory tower, it's a very appealing idea that there might exist at least--at the very least--36 righteous people on this earth. Small human pillars to ensure that we maintain a minimum of kindness and righteousness.”

“What did you think about?" I wish I could tell him that I thought about him, but I lied to him once and I won't do it again. And besides, I wasn't thinking about Xander either. "I thought about angels," I say."Angels?""You know. The ones in the old stories. How they can fly to heaven." "Do you think anyone believes in them anymore?" He asks."I don't know. No. Do you?""I believe in you," he says, his voice hushed and almost reverent. "That's more faith than I ever thought I'd have.”

“Niels remembered all too well the telex machine that had received updates and warnings from Interpol's headquarters in Lyon. The telex machine had run nonstop. The monotonous sound of the mechanical printer reminded them that the world was a fucked-up place. If anyone wanted a brief, concentrated look into the world's misery, all he had to do was spend 20 minutes in front of the humming machine: serial killers, drug smuggling, women kidnapped for prostitution, cross-border traffic with stolen children, illegal immigration, enriched uranium.... You could get a headache simply from standing in front of the fax machine. It made you want to scream and run away; to jump into the sea and wish that life had never crawled up out of the water, that the dinosaurs still dominated the earth.”

“Did you hear about the middle Eastern potentate?" he asked me. "This potentate called a meeting of the wise men in the kingdom, and said, "I want you to gather all the world's knowledge together in one place so that my sons can read it and learn."The wise men went off, and after year, they came back with twenty-five volumes of knowledge. This potentate looked at it and he said, "No. It's too long. Make it shorter." So the wise men went off for another year. When they came back, they gave the potentate a piece of paper with one sentence on it. A single sentence. You know what the sentence was?"Bob looked at me. I shook my head. "The sentence was: "This too shall pass."Bob paused, let it sink in: "I heard that when I was very young and it has always stuck with me.”