“There was a mysterious chasm between this island and the greater world, just like there was between old and young, ancient and new.”

“She thought she would know when it happened. But now, as she looked around, she wondered if it was really like that at all. Maybe it happened in a million different ways, when you were thinking of it and you weren't. Maybe there was no gap, no jump, no chasm. You didn't forget yourself all at once. Maybe you just looked around one time or another and you thought, Hey. And there you were. ”

“There was a moment in between, a moment flung free in the midst of the transition, when he made contact. That was the moment she would dwell on.”

“He wanted to take his love back from her so badly. The old techniques didn’t work anymore. In fact, they’d never worked. How do you stop loving someone? It was one of the world’s more brutal mysteries. The more you tried, the less it worked.”

“It was funny how the old practices always came around again. It was the rhythm of human enterprise to invent and worship some new approach, to fully reject it a generation later, to realize the need for it again a generation or two after that and then hastily reinvent it as new, usually without its original elegance. Scientists hated to look backward for anything.”

“What is it we recognize? The soul is a mysterious thing. It's no less mysterious for me, though I've seen my own and others' refracted through hundreds of bodies over time.”

“You get older and you learn there is one sentence just four worlds long and if you can say it to yourself it offers more comfort than almost any other. It goes like this… Ready ” “Ready.” “At least I tried.”