“History,' Mari muttered, as if she'd overheard his thoughts. 'Why do we need to know what happened before we were born?' 'So hopefully we get smarter and don't make the same mistakes again.”

“Not to know what happened before we were born is to remain perpetually a child.”

“There's lots of things you don't know. All kinds of strange things . . . mostly they happened before we were born: that makes them seem to me so much more real.”

“Well, what I don't get is why do we exist? I don't mean how, but why.' I watched the fireflies of his thoughts orbit his head. He said, 'we exist because we exist. . .we could imagine all sorts of universes like this one, but this is the one that happened.”

“We remember the pains of our pasts, so we don't make the same mistakes in our futures.”

“We know people by their stories: their history, their habits, their secrets, their triumphs and failures. We know them by what they do. We want to know mountains too, but they’ve got no story. So we do the next best thing. We throw ourselves onto them and make the stories happen.”