“Death is nature's way of making things continually interesting. Death is the possibility of change. Every individual gets its allotted lifespan, its chance to try something new on the world. But time is called and the molecules which make up leaf and limb, heart and eye are disassembled and redistributed to other tenants.”

“It's the discomforting end of humankind's bargain with consciousness. We empathize with other beings and imagine we feel their pain. Either the empathy binds us to the mechanics of live, or we shut the empathy off. ”

“[Stephenson] believes that, as research becomes more airborne and more office-bound, we generalize more and more, and we lose the vast range of wolf experience; in fact, there are soft wolves and hard wolves, kind wolves and malicious wolves, soldiers and nurses, philosophers and bullies. ”

“Death is just nature's way of making room for the less experienced.”

“Every man that ever lived craved perfect happiness, the detective poignantly reflected. But how can we have it when we know we’re going to die? Each joy was clouded by the knowledge it would end. And so nature had implanted in us a desire for something unattainable? No. It couldn’t be. It makes no sense. Every other striving implanted by nature had a corresponding object that wasn’t a phantom. Why this exception? the detective reasoned. It was nature making hunger when there wasn’t any food. We continue. We go on. Thus death proved life.”

“And in it's magical pattern there was now a new element, a new glow, a cast of a golden colour which suffused everything, the source of which was a character in a book he had half read of and would never finish. He was not interested in what happened to Jay Gatsby. He was only interested that Jay Gatsby should exist.”

“None of it seemed very real, but I suppose that's the trouble withhistory. It's the one thing we have to make up for ourselves.”