Sandra had studied psychiatry in order to understand the nature of despair, but all she had really learned was the pharmacology of it. The human mind was easier to medicate than to comprehend.

By definition, you can’t experience your own death. Death is the end of consciousness. And consciousness persists. In the language of physics, consciousness is conserved.I am the one who wakes up in the morning.Always.Every morning.I...

We are all strangers to ourself and each other and we are seldom formally introduced.

The universe, it seemed, was full to brimming with lonesome places.

Children wear their natures like brightly-colored clothes; that’s why they lie so transparently. Adulthood is the art of deceit.

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

The conversation was mesmerizing, not for its content but for the cadences of the talk, the rhythm we fell into when we were alone, now as before. Every conversation between friends or lovers creates its...

There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years. Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars. Or all the things that...

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

Certainly it’s a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don’t seem as bad as the Dominion histories make them out to be. Though clearly they were imperfect.””I don’t deny that they...