We're as ephemeral as raindrops. We all fall, and we all land somewhere.

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.

I won't put my ignorance on an altar and call it God. It feels like idolatry, like the worst kind of idolatry.

It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel's ass.

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

Ecstasy hates company.

I believed there were no Hypotheticals in the sense of consciously acting agents - conscious entities. There was only the process. The needles of evolution, endlessly knitting.