“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.”

“We tell lies when we are afraid... afraid of what we don't know, afraid of what others will think, afraid of what will be found out about us. But every time we tell a lie, the thing that we fear grows stronger.”

“Our lives aren't even about doing real things most of the time. We think and talk about people we've never met, pretend to visit places we've never actually been, to discuss things that are just names as though they were as real as rocks or animals or something. Information Age. Hell it's the Imagination Age. We're living in our own minds.No, she decided as the plane began its steep descent, really we're living in other people's minds.”

“If someone had told her that she would be transported to what was for all purposes a magical land, where history could be rewritten at a whim, or people could suddenly be shrunk to the size of poppy seeds, but that at least for this moment, her most pressing concern would have been the absence of cigarettes, she would have thought them mad.”

“You show me what someone listens to, I’ll tell you everything you want to know about his soul. (For instance, a bunch of Nickelback albums would have indicated he never had a soul in the first place.)”

“Johnny Battistini had gone to Japan once as a replacement drummer for a metal band past its prime ... a one-shot gig that he had talked about for years afterward. At the time, Theo had been frustrated by Johnny’s inability to describe Tokyo and why it had made such an impression on him. Although he spoke about it frequently ... he could never explain his fascination more clearly than: ‘It was just ... weird. It’s like a regular city, but then it’s all different and shit. But to them it’s not different. And that’s the really weird part!”