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

[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.

To capture the pawn, threaten the queen.

Does it strike you, Mr. Keller, that we live every day in the science fiction of our youth?

These movies belonged to the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that period of great, unsustainable, and hedonistic prosperity, driven by the burning of Earth's reserves of perishable oil, which culminated in the False Tribulation, and the wars, and the plagues, and the painful dwindling of inflated populations to more reasonable numbers.

I understand so very little. But I am not afraid to look: I am a good observer at last. My eyes are open, and I am not afraid.

Understanding is better than ignorance. Ignorance, unlike life, unlike narrative, is static. Understanding implies a forward motion, thus the possibility of change.