Just because the world often seemed to reward ugliness was no excuse to give up on beauty.

The world had edges but you couldn’t see them going, only when you were trying to come back.

There was a worm addicted to grape leaves, she continued, and suddenly it woke up. Call it a miracle, whatever, something woke it up and it wasn’t a worm anymore. It was the whole vineyard, and the orchard too, the fruit, the trunks, an ever-expanding joy that didn’t need to devour anything.

If it wasn’t possible to reinvent the past in such a way as to make it conform to the present’s cheerful view of the way things ought to have been, why bother living?

Two adolescent girls on a hot summer night--hardly the material of great literature, which tends to endow all male experience (that of those twin brothers who found themselves adrift so many years ago in the dark northern woods for instance) with universal radiance. Faithless sons, wars and typhoons, fields of blood, greed and knives: our literature's full of such stories. And yet suppose for an instant that it wasn't the complacent father but his bored daughter who was the Prime Mover; suppose that what came first wasn't an appetite for drama but the urge to awaken it. Mightn't we then permit a single summer in the lives of two bored girls to represent an essential stage in the history of the universe?

You could try making sense out of the universe, but you were too small and the parts you needed to see were too large or even smaller.

...the beginning and the end of time. These are the same thing, as everybody knows who came into this universe via a wormhole.

A girl in a crown of stars was coming toward him, but before she could see who he was he slipped through his curtains of flesh.

Apes or human – we all made the same mistake, tempted by shifting leaves or the smell of sex, by music or a ripe banana.

The irony was not lost on any of us that despite the theme there was a robot on the throne.

It isn’t time that folds, it’s space.

In my lap I had my dear little pug, the smell of whose ears will always be sweeter to me than all the perfumes of Araby and the scent of heliotrope combined.

According to the prophecy a child was going to come along that would be part human and part robot and this child was going to change everything. Of course it was way too soon – both sides were totally unprepared, not to mention the fact that they had their parts mixed up. The girls were only interested in romance, and the robots in completing a transaction.

Think of them like gods, Janice said, because that’s what they are. The nape of a human neck is especially easy to see through – that’s why they love it when we bow our heads. It doesn’t have anything to do with praying. Prayers bore them.

Everybody thinks it’s going to be different for them, Janice said. The dinosaurs thought so too.