“Which came first, the mind or the idea of the mind? Have you never wondered? They arrived together. The mind is an idea.”

The people came to fear even their closest neighbors. At the level of the individual, the community, and the nation, people sought signs of others’ ill intentions; and everywhere they looked, they found them, for this is what looking does.

The only thing binding individuals together is ideas. Ideas mutate and spread; they change their hosts as much as their hosts change them.

A society that fears knowledge is a society that fears itself.

And it is fragile. It can be blackened by fear, and superstition. By the year 2050, when the conflict began, the world had fallen upon fearful, superstitious times.

I write with teenagers in mind.

In the end, living is defined by dying. Book-ended by oblivion, we are caught in the vice of terror, squeezed to bursting by the approaching end. Fear is ever-present, waiting to be called to the surface. Change brought fear, and fear brought destruction.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism.

I try not to be surprised. Surprise is the public face of a mind that has been closed.

Science is a little bit more than a wonderful way of modelling and predicting; its a wonderful technical abstraction. I think science is a really wonderful technical abstraction.

Consciousness is the feel of accessing memory.

The more the media peddled fear, the more the people lost the ability to believe in one another. For every new ill that befell them, the media created an explanation, and the explanation always had a face and a name.

Are you saying a society wracked by plague is preferable to one wracked by indifference?

I cannot choose to ignore this feeling, of life slowly bleeding out of me. I cannot ignore the fact that life only makes sense to me when I see a smile, or feel another hand in mine.

Human spirit is the ability to face the uncertainty of the future with curiosity and optimism. It is the belief that problems can be solved, differences resolved. It is a type of confidence.

The mind is not a machine, it is an idea. And the Idea resists all attempts to control it.

… from our vantage point it is now clear that the only thing the population had to fear was fear itself.

But how he acts, and what he says, and what he does, and who he is, they don’t line up anymore, and the lie is in that not lining up, the lie is in not being what she needs but pretending that he is. No one says a word, and she sees it every minute they have together.

We’re all victims in a battle, that we never had to fight. It’s okay. It’s alright. Steady now, we’re in this thing together.

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.

A refuge, a magical world where anyone can go, where all kinds of people can come together, and anything can happen. We are limited only by our imaginations.

Why don’t the Beatles get back together? Why don’t nobody sing of romance?

My wife and I work out together almost every day. It’s just a great way to spend time together. We’re going to run a marathon together later this year, and that’s one more goal that we’ll accomplish as husband and wife.

We stayed very close to each other [with Leek Kirk], and Lee was amazing.

Hooves clomping over the whitewashed planks, Doren sprinted along the boardwalk after Rondus, a portly satyr with butterscotch fur and horns that curved away from each other. Puffing hard, Rondus cut through a gazebo and started down the stairs to the field.