"What we control," Juliette said, "is our actions once fate puts us there."

It was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them.

Statistics were magic like this: they could tell you with near-certainty that a thing would occur, without a hint of when or where.

Sometimes a thing needed opening before closure was found.

We are not the people who made this world, Lukas, but it's up to us to survive it. You need to understand that." "We can't control where we are right now," he mumbled, "just what we do going forward.

He thought of men like Hitler, Stalin, and Napoleon. All it took was a lot of seemingly decent people to put the wrong person in power and then fall under their spell.

There were certain things, learned so young and remembered so deep that they felt like little stones in the center of her mind.