Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity. - Robert Charles Wilson

But really, who do you think we’re working for? Not some Sunday school god, not the proverbial loving shepherd. The shoving leopard, more like.

It was the kind of experience, Molly said, that would grow calluses on an angel’s ass.

Later Julian would give me another book he had culled from among the Archival duplicates, a short novel called The Time Machine by Mr. H. G. Wells, about a marvelous but apparently imaginary cart which carried a man into the future—and it fascinated me—but the Archive itself was a Time Machine in everything but name. Here were voices preserved on browning paper like pressed flowers, whispering apostasies into the ear of a new century.