[There was] only one news channel, overseen by a bland and complexly multicultural board of advisors. It broadcast in fifteen languages and was, as a rule, interesting in none of them.

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

For such people the consummate act of moral clarity was a lynching or a suicide bombing, a fatwa or a pogrom. And they were ascendant now, rising like dark stars over a terminal landscape .

If I am an agnostic, Calyxa, it's because I'm also a realist.

Goddamn you," Jacob said. "There's no damnation, Jacob. No Heaven but the forest and no God but the hive.

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

Do you want to tell the truth, or do you want to tell a story?