“Imagine the terrestrial timespan as an outstretched arm: a single swipe of an emery-board, across the nail of the third finger, erases human history. We haven't been around for very long. And we've turned the earth's hair white. Sh e seemed to have eternal youth but now she's ageing awful fast, like an addict, like a waxless candle. Jesus, have you seen her recently? we used to live and die without any sense of the planet getting older, of mother earth getting older, living and dying. We used to live outside history. But now we're all coterminous. We're inside history now all right, on its leading edge, with the wind ripping past our ears. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. And maybe love can't bear it either, and flees all planets when they reach this condition, when they get to the end of their twentieth centuries.”

“The children of the nuclear age, I think, were weakened in their capacity to love. Hard to love, when you're bracing yourself for impact. Hard to love, when the loved one, and the lover, might at any instant become blood and flames, along with everybody else.”

“Love might have expanded her. But we are not all of us going to get loved. We are not all of us going to get expanded.”

“It seems to me that you need a lot of courage, or a lot of something, to enter into others, into other people. We all think that everyone else lives in fortresses, in fastnesses: behind moats, behind sheer walls studded with spikes and broken glass. But in fact we inhabit much punier structures. We are, as it turns out, all jerry-built. Or not even. You can just stick your head under the flap of the tent and crawl right in. If you get the okay. ”

“There are many accounts, uniformly incomplete, of what it is like to die slowly. But there is no information at all about what it is like to die suddenly and violently. We are being gentle when we describe such deaths as instant. 'The passengers died instantly.' Did they? It may be that some people can do it, can die instantly. The very old, because the vital powers are weak; the very young, because there is no great accretion of experience needing to be scattered. Muhammad Atta was 33. As for him (and perhaps this is true even in cases of vaporisation; perhaps this was true even for the wall-shadows of Japan), it took much longer than an instant. By the time the last second arrived, the first second seemed as far away as childhood...Even as his flesh fried and his blood boiled, there was life, kissing its fingertips. Then it echoed out, and ended.”

“When you considered this world--people winched up and lowered down into the earth in steel cages and speed-fed through the tunnels, with doors cracking everywhere, and arctic winds mingling with dusty gaps of fire from the planet's core--it was hard to believe how delicate life was, how breakable things were.”

“You know, I wouldn’t have done this a month ago. I wouldn’t have done it then. Then I was avoiding. Now I’m just waiting. Things happen to me. They do. They have to go ahead and happen. You watch – you wait… Things still happen here and something is waiting to happen to me. I can tell. Recently my life feels like a bloodcurdling joke. Recently my life has taken on *form* Something is waiting. I am waiting. Soon, it will stop waiting – any day now. Awful things can happen any time. This is the awful thing.”