“I now understand that deja vu is the awareness of the simultaneous occurrence of a nearly identical event in an alternate universe as perceived by another version of yourself. That haunting sense of unreality and the flimsiness of time, of identity itself, is a window through which we glimpse another world.”

“We cannot live in peace without Law. And though law cannot be perfect, it may be just if it is written in ignorance of the identity of the claimants and applied equally to all. Then it is a possession not only of the claimants but of the society, which may now base its actions upon a reasonable assumption of the law’s treatment.But ‘fairness’ is not only a nonlegal but an antilegal process, for it deals not with universally applicable principles and strictures, but with specific cases, responding to the perceived or proclaimed needs of individual claimants, and their desire for extralegal preference. And it could be said to substitute fairness (a determination which must always be subjective) for justice (the application of the legislated will of the electorate), is to enshrine greed--the greed, in this case, not for wealth, but for preference.”

“Mammals require three essentials in life, identity, stimulation, and security, and by far the most important of these three psychological cornerstones is identity.”

“to read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire from one sentence to another, from one action to another, from one level of a text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of trying to possess it we should take pleasure in its teasing”

“Love helps us develop an identity secure enough to allow itself to be placed in another's care and protection.”

“What do we mean - it is a common term of praise - when we say that a book is "original"? Not, usually, that the writer has invented something without precedent, but that she has made us "perceive" what we already, in a conceptual sense, "know", by deviating from the conventional, habitual ways of representing reality. Defamiliarization, in short, is another word for "originality". I shall have recourse to it again in these glances at the art of fiction.”

“They come to understand, with awe, the complexity of the compound identity that existed on the Earth. They conclude with a shudder that the Earthly you is utterly lost, unpreserved in the afterlife. You were all these ages, and you were none.”