“It's just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second.”

“I'm sorry I started all this by trying to fly and I'd take it back if I could but I can't, so please think of it from my point of view: if you die I will have a dead brother and it will be me instead of you who suffers.Justin thought of his brother on that warm summer day, standing up on the windowsill holding both their futures, light and changeable as air, in his outstretched arms.Of course, Justin thought, I'm part of his fate just as he's part of mine. I hadn't considered it from his point of view. Or from the point of view of the universe, either. It's just a playing field crammed full of cause and effect, billions of dominoes, each knocking over billions more, setting off trillions of actions every second. A butterfly flaps its wings in Africa and my brother in Luton thinks he can fly.The child nodded. A piano might fall on your head, he said, but it also might not. And in the meantime you never know. Something nice might happen.”

“Let’s pause a moment to think about how much $1 trillion really is. Such large-scale economic matters are often discussed in terms of trillions, but how many people really understand how much a trillion is?Let’s say you've been told you have to wait for something very special for one million seconds. How long would your wait be? A little more than eleven and a half days. But what if you had to wait for one billion seconds? Well, you’d be waiting a little longer: try almost thirty-two years.And for one trillion seconds? We’ll round it off to 31,700 years.”

“The technology involved in making anything invisible is so infinitely complex that nine hundred and ninety-nine billion, nine hundred and ninety-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a trillion it is much simpler and more effective just to take the thing away and do without it.”

“Billions need to play.”

“There were timelines branching and branching, a mega-universe of universes, millions more every minute. Billions? Trillions? The universe split every time someone made a decision. Split, so that every decision ever made could go both ways. Every choice made by every man, woman, and child was reversed in the universe next door.”