“Most houses were crammed with immovable objects in their proper places, and each object told you what to do - here you ate, here you slept, here you sat. I tried to imagine carpets, wardrobes, pictures, chairs, a sewing machine, in these gaping, smashed-up rooms. I was pleased by how irrelevant, how puny such objects now appeared.”

“What can it be about low temperatures that sharpens the edges of objects?”

“How do you feel?'Scared,' she said. 'Really scared.' But you don't look it.' I feel I'm shivering inside.”

“You pull a book from the shelf and there was an invention... Almost like cooking, I thought sleepily. Instead of heat transforming the ingredients, there's pure invention, the spark, the hidden element. What resulted was more than the sum of parts... At one level it was obvious enough how these separarte parts were tipped in and deployed. The mystery was in how they were blended into somthing cohesive and plausible, how the ingredients were cooked into something so delicious. As my thought scattered and I drifted toward the borders of oblivion, I thought I almost understood how it was done.”

“No one's been in the kitchen since he left it. On the table are his cup, Theo's empty water bottle and, beside it, the remote control. It's stil faintly surprising, this fidelity of objects, sometimes reassuring, sometimes sinister.”

“While my friends struggled and calculated, I reached a solution by a set of floating steps that were partly visual, partly just a feeling for what was right. It was hard to explain how I knew what I knew.”

“Something has happened, hasn't it? ... It's like being up close to something so large you don't even see it. Even now, I'm not sure I can. But I know it's there.”