“... Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build--but what happens when in all the world there are only termite hills left but no bush?”

“The world was all mud and wire. The war in the heavens was only a faint imitation of the horror men had learned to make.”

“After all, is it not the way we humans shape the universe, shape time itself? Do we not take the raw stuff of chaos and impose a beginning, middle, and end on it, like the simplest and most profound of folktales, to reflect the shapes of our own tiny lives? And if the physicists are right, that the physical world changes as it is observed, and we are its only known observers, then might we not be bending the entire chaotic universe, the eternal, ever-active Now, to fit that familiar form?”

“People in science fiction flicks always seemed to know useful things about the places time travel took them. But what if the time traveler had been only an average history student? What then?”

“There is no such thing as an accident. That's what science is all about. (...) There are only patterns we don't yet recognize.”

“I've always preferred the city at night. I believe that San Judas, or any city, belongs to the people who sleep there. Or maybe they don't sleep - some don't - but they live there. Everybody else is just a tourist. Venice, Italy, for instance, pulls in a millions tourists for their own Carnival season but the actual local population is only a couple of hundred thousand. Lots of empty canals and streets at night, especially when you get away from the big hotels, and the residents pretty much have it to themselves when tourist season slows during the winter. Jude has character - everybody agrees on that. It also has that thing I like best about a city: You can never own it, but it you treat it with respect it will eventually invite you in and make you one of its true citizens. But like I said, you've got to live there. If you're never around after the bars close, or at the other end of the night as the early workers get up to start another day and the coffee shops and news agents raise their security gates, then you don't really know the place, do you?”

“You are only a prisoner when you surrender.”