“So we face our final hours...and all that was once certain has become uncertain. Except for defeat. That, as always, is the end of all our stories.”

“If we do not reach our hands will always be empty.”

“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?”

“He who is certain he knows the ending of things when he is only beginning them is either extremely wise or extremely foolish; no matter which is true, he is certainly an unhappy man, for he has put a knife in the heart of wonder.”

“During its timeless hours of movement and inspection, as it floated on the number-winds and learned from their shape and force, it had become aware of something else, something so far from the conceptual map of the environment it had originally been given as to briefly constitute a new danger to the Nemesis program's logical integrity.”

“Now I end my death song. I give my farewell to mountain and sky. It has been good to be alive.”

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