This is because the Greeks had it backward, and no matter how hard humans try thinking otherwise, they still think like Greeks. For the Greeks, when you looked ahead all you saw was the past....

It isn’t time that folds, it’s space.

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

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 –...

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?

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....

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.

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

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.

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

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

Some people think what you’re supposed to do in life is fill yourself up with loads of things like names, the more the better. But that’s not how it works.

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

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...

History is boring, Janice concurred, undaunted as usual. It’s not like the Ride of the Valkyries. It’s what comes before history that isn’t boring.

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,...

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.