“I could not separate our fates now any more than I could sort the blood from the ash. We are tied together by our love of the same girl.”

“So if we're all quarks and electrons ..." he begins.What?"We could make love and it would be nothing more than quarks and electrons rubbing together."Better than that," I say. "Nothing really 'rubs together' in the microscopic world. Matter never really touches other matter, so we could make love without any of our atoms touching at all. Remember that electrons sit on the outside of atoms, repelling other electrons. So we could make love and actually repel each other at the same time.”

“We brought death to our enemies, and I loved the power of it. And that final love, one I shared with my father, frightened me more than any battle ever could.”

“Presumably there is indeed no purpose in the ultimate fate of the cosmos, but do any of us really tie our life's hopes to the ultimate fate of the cosmos anyway? Of course we don't; not if we are sane. Our lives are ruled by all sorts of closer, warmer, human ambitions and perceptions.”

“Even now, I could no more chart her influence than I could the gravitational powers that rule the tides. I suppose that could be said of anyone we love, that their effects on our lives run so deeply, with such grave force, we hardly know what they mean until they are gone.”

“The girl I used to love is no longer a girl, and this saddens me more than our separation. It puts my own mortality vividly on display, in contrast to my eternally youthful memories.”