“There are people.There are stories.The people think they shape the stories, but the reverse if often closer to the truth.Stories shape the world. They exist independently of people, and in places quite devoid of man, there may yet be mythologies.”

“A world grows up around me. Am I shaping it, or do its predetermined contours guide my hand?”

“The Rudderless World is not shaped by vague metaphysical Forces. It is not God who kills the Children. Not Fate that butchers them or Destiny that feeds them to the Dogs. ... It´s us. Only us.”

“There is a house above the world, where the over-people gather. There is a man with wings like a bird.. there is a man who can sea across the planet and wring diamonds from its anthracite. There is a man who moves so fast that his life is an endless gallery of statues..In the house above the world the over-people gather..To a fry, mad voice that whispers of earthdeath.”

“You see, there's the way things seemed and then there's the way things were and one is so often the total reverse of the other.”

“Through my blue fingers, pink grains are falling, haphazard, random, a disorganized stream of silicone that seems pregnant with the possibility of every conceivable shape… But this is illusion. Things have their shape in time, not space alone. Some marble blocks have statues within them, embedded in their future.”

“Thermodynamic miracles... events with odds against so astronomical they're effectively impossible, like oxygen spontaneously becoming gold. I long to observe such a thing.And yet, in each human coupling, a thousand million sperm vie for a single egg. Multiply those odds by countless generations, against the odds of your ancestors being alive; meeting; siring this precise son; that exact daughter... Until your mother loves a man she has every reason to hate, and of that union, of the thousand million children competing for fertilization, it was you, only you, that emerged. To distill so specific a form from that chaos of improbability, like turning air to gold... that is the crowning unlikelihood. The thermodynamic miracle.But...if me, my birth, if that's a thermodynamic miracle... I mean, you could say that about anybody in the world!.Yes. Anybody in the world. ..But the world is so full of people, so crowded with these miracles that they become commonplace and we forget... I forget. We gaze continually at the world and it grows dull in our perceptions. Yet seen from the another's vantage point. As if new, it may still take our breath away. Come...dry your eyes. For you are life, rarer than a quark and unpredictable beyond the dreams of Heisenberg; the clay in which the forces that shape all things leave their fingerprints most clearly. Dry your eyes... and let's go home.”