It’s too bad she’s the first girl I ever really knew, Thomas thought. I have no way of knowing whether all girls are this way or if she’s unique. I w… - Tim Powers

There's something you should know about me."
"What's that?"
"I don't know, but you should know it.

He fought to think rationally.
Guilt, he reminded himself, is an electro-chemical event in the physical brain. It’s one of the useless side-effects of consciousness, which is itself irrelevant. The ideal is the lines in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall:” “Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.” The important thing was that all of it moved in determinate grooves.

White seagulls, luminous in the new daylight, were circling high overhead against the blue of the clean sky, whistling and piping in the open, unechoing air as if calling out the news of the soon-returning spring.