So this was the rest of his life. It felt like a party to which he'd been invited, but at an address he couldn't actually locate. Someone must be having fun at it, this life of his; only, right at the moment, it wasn't him.

Science is a tool, and we invent tools to do things we want. It's a question of how those tools are used by people.

But I began then to think of time as having a shape, something you could see, like a series of liquid transparencies, one laid on top of another.

Your friend is intellectually honourable," Jimmy's mother would say. "He doesn't lie to himself.

What fabrications they are, mothers. Scarecrows, wax dolls for us to stick pins into, crude diagrams. We deny them an existence of their own, we make them up to suit ourselves -- our own hungers, our own wishes, our own deficiencies.

He’d developed a strangely tender feeling towards such words, as if they were children abandoned in the woods and it was his duty to rescue them.

He was deciding whether to cut her throat or love her forever.