Personally, I don't believe in anything more supernatural than what you read about in the Bible, and I only believe that one day out of seven.

Some things are taken away from you, some you leave behind and some you carry with you, world without end.

When does loyalty become martyrdom?

And death? I don't fear death. I dread the absence of it.

The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its own easy or awkward rhythms, hidden talk that runs like a subterranean river under even the most banal exchange.

We're all born strangers to ourselves and each other, and we're seldom formally introduced.

From this new point of view, the universe I had inhabited became an object I could perceive in its entirety. It was a hypersphere embedded in a cloud of alternative states - the sum of all possible quantum trajectories from the big bang to the decay of matter. "Reality" - history as we had known or inferred it - was only the most likely of these possible trajectories. There were countless others, real in a different sense: a vast but finite set of paths not taken, a ghostly forest of quantum alternatives, the shores of an unknown sea.