but all the things Science had promised us hadn't come to pass. Disease was still a problem. Starvation was still a problem. Violence and crime and war were still problems. In spite of the advance of technology, things just hadn't changed the way everyone had hoped and thought they would.

The building was on fire, and it wasn’t my fault.

Apocalypse is a frame of mind." [Nicodemus] said then. "A belief. A surrender to inevitability. It is a despair for the future. It is the death of hope.

Souls, I said. I mean, you always wonder if they're real. Even if you believe in them, you still have to wonder: Is my existence just this body? Is there really something more? Do I really have a soul?Uriel's smile blossomed again. You've got it backward, Harry, he said. You are a soul. You have a body.

You can't plan for everything or you never get started in the first place.

It was one of those moments that would have had dramatic music if my life were a movie, but instead I got a radio jingle for some kind of submarine sandwich place blaring over the store's ambient stereo. The movie of my life must be really low-budget.

You're dead, son. Cheer is contraindicated.