If you understood the facts they needed no embroidery: all the wonder was already there, the more spellbinding because it was true. - Robert Charles Wilson

We spent a lot of time discussing cosmology first. I think that was your father’s unique way of evaluating people. You can tell a lot about a person, he once said, by the way they look at the stars.

He hated the idea of eulogizing himself. Some tasks are best left to others, surely including obituaries.

Times like this, with the wind moving the grass and curling around her like a huge cool hand, Tess felt the world as a second presence, as another person, as if the wind and the grass had voices of their own and she could hear them talking.