“There was something about him, a kind of warm light from inside that you wanted to be near. It reminded her of those little plastic sticks that you snapped so the liquid inside made them glow.”

“And then, despite all these concerns, Arnette felt her mind begin to loosen, the images of the day unwinding inside her like a spool of thread, pulling her down into sleep.”

“A baby was a fact. It was a being with a mind and a nature, and you could feel about it any way you liked, but a baby wouldn't care. Just by existing, it demanded that you believe in a future: the future it would crawl in, walk in, live in. A baby was a piece of time; it was a promise you made that the world made back to you.”

“It's all well and good to save the human race. You could say I'm in favor. But you might want to pay a little more attention to what's right in front of you.”

“Events can seem random while you're living them, but when you look back, what do you see? A chain of coincidences? Plain old luck? Or something more?”

“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.”

“It was possible, he understood, for a person's life to become just a long series of mistakes, and that the end, when it came, was just one more mistake in a chain of bad choices. The thing was, most of these mistakes were actually borrowed from other people. You took their bad ideas, and for whatever reason, made them your own.”