You can step in the same river but the water will always be new. - Kate Atkinson

If she had been in charge of designing the human race she would have gone about things differently. (A golden shaft of light through the ear for conception perhaps and a well-fitting hatch somewhere modest for escape nine months later.)

She had been here before. She had never been here before. There was always something just out of sight, just around a corner, something she could never chase down — something that was chasing her down.

Fifty-five thousand, five hundred and seventy-three dead from Bomber Command. Seven million German dead, including the five hundred thousand killed by the Allied bombing campaign. The sixty million dead overall of the Second World War, including eleven million murdered in the Holocaust. The sixteen million of the First World War, over four million in Vietnam, forty million to the Mongol conquests, three and a half million to the Hundred Years War, the fall of Rome took seven million, the Napoleonic Wars took four million, twenty million to the Taiping Rebellion. And so on and so on and so on, all the way back to the Garden when Cain killed Abel.