“It was a short session of the simple being-ness that he had long coveted for The Afterlife. What Glynis had called "doing nothing," The smelling and seeing and hearing and small noticings of sheer animal presence in the world surely constituted activity of a sort, perhaps the most important kind. This was a form of companionship that he'd been especially cherishing with Glynis of late: devoid of conversation, but so surprising in its contrast to being by yourself.”

“You were not surprised to find yourself ill adapted to the world, but it did surprise you that the world had produced a being who now lived in it as a foreigner. Do plants commit suicide? Do animals die of helplessness? They either function or disappear. You were perhaps a weak link, an accidental evolutionary dead end, a temporary anomaly not destined to burgeon again.”

“Max had been a cat as long as he could remember, but he was pretty sure he'd been a rock star in one of his previous lives. He just had that kind of cool about him.”

“He'd done as he'd pleased and even had often enjoyed long runs of luck where he hadn't been caught. But the luckiest moment of his life had been being caught.”

“At the moment everything was being destroyed she had created that which was most difficult: she had not drawn something out of nothing (a meaningless act), but given to nothing, in its form of nothing, the form of something.”

“I had noticed that I had no difficulty conversing with robots, because absolutely nothing surprised them. They were incapable of surprise. A very sensible quality.”