“It happened fast. Thirty-two minutes for one world to die, another to be born.”

“How stark everything became, at the end, all the wishes for one's children distilled by the world's swift cruelty into the desperate hope that death would take them fast.”

“The world was a world of dreaming souls who could not die.”

“Just ten minutes, but everything was different now. He was different, the world was different. His father was nowhere in it. And with that, tears came to his eyes.”

“Mankind had built a world that would take hundred years to die. A century for the last lights to go out.”

“Rust, corrosion, wind, rain. The nibbling teeth of mice and the acrid droppings of insects and the devouring jaws of years. The was of nature upon machines, of the planet's chaotic forces upon the works of humankind. The energy that man had pulled from the earth was being inexorably pulled back into it, sucked like water down a drain. Before long, if it hadn't happened already, not a single high-tension pole would be left standing on the earth.Mankind had built a world that would take a hundred years to die. A century for the last light to go out.”

“It was funny, Grey thought. Not funny ha-ha, but funny strange, the whole idea of time. He'd thought it was one thing but it was actually another. It wasn't a line but a circle, and even more; it was a circle made of circles made of circles, each lying on top of the other, so that every moment was next to every other moment, all at once. And once you knew this you couldn't unknow it. Such as now the way he could see events as they were about to unfold, as if they'd already happened, because in a way they had.”