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The only thing that mattered was that the quarter century or so he had remaining would be his life, to live out as he chose and in his own best interests. Nothing took precedence over that: not work, not friendships, not relationships with women. Those were all components of his life, and valuable ones, but they did not define it or control it. That was up to him, and him alone.

The possibilities, Jeff knew, were endless.

Those choice had to be made, Jeff thought He’d learned to accept the potential losses, in the hope that they would be outweighed by the gains. The only certain failure, he knew, and the most grievous, would be never to risk at all.

Our deepest hope as humans lies in technology; but our deepest trust lies in nature. These forces are like tectonic plates grinding inexorably into each other in one, long, slow collision.

This collision is not new, but more than anything else it is defining our era. Technology is steadily creating the dominant issues and upheavals of our time.

This wasn’t “next time,” and there would be no more of that; there was only this time, this sole finite time of whose direction and outcome Jeff knew absolutely nothing. He would not waste, not take for granted, a single moment of it.

You know, don’t you, that no amount of wishing that this were not the case can make it not the case. No amount of praying that you are not transgendered will make you something other than what you are. No amount of love from anyone will make you fit inside a body that does not match your spirit.

Like fish who do not know they swim in water, we are seldom aware of the atmosphere of the times through which we move, how strange and singular they are. But when we approach another age, its alienness stands out before us, almost as if that were its most obvious quality...

The [Greek] myths were... attempting—at a deeper level—to feel the intangible and say the unsayable.

To be without music was, for the ancient Greeks, to be already dead... Ancient Greece was a culture of song.

Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on their way back.

For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life.

Human beings never know more than a part, as "through a glass darkly"; and all knowledge comes to us in pieces.

"Stories are light. Light is precious in a world so dark. Begin at the beginning. Tell Gregory a story. Make some light."