Quotes from Robert Masello

Relativity, he reflected, was simple compared to the mysteries of Eros.

he had no doubt that the earth would be a vastly different place—a place where the sword of Damocles hung above it by only the most slender thread, forever after.

Every species, from the blue whale to the fruit fly, will struggle, with every fiber of its being, to preserve its own existence. And the more I studied them, even the single-celled diatoms, the more beautiful they all appeared to me. Life is a miracle—an absolute fucking miracle—in every form it takes, and I just never felt right again about taking any of it unnecessarily.

Were they merely mortal remains? she thought, as the air cleared and a billowy white cloud momentarily obscured the sunbeams. Was that all she'd let go, or had she, as her father promised, allowed a falcon to take flight?

That God does not play dice with the universe. The cosmos cannot simply be a game, designed at random and made without reason. But perhaps He is playing some other game. A game we don't know yet, with rules we can't understand.

Wherever humans had set foot, the carnage had been so brutal, so extraordinary, and so quick that the very thing making the killers rich was nearly eradicated in a hundred years' time.

The moment Lucas stepped beside her, she felt as if her shelter were complete. The canopy might ward off the sun, but it was having Lucas at her side that made her feel protected, fulfilled . . . loved. She glanced up at him, and though she saw that his tie was still askew, she resisted the urge to straighten it. There would be a lifetime to indulge such impulses.

If you had to attend a football game, this was the kind of day to do it, Lucas thought. The sun was shining in a bright blue sky, the air was crisp and cold, and the crowd passing through the high arches into the Princeton stadium was in a festive mood, waving pennants and calling out to each other in boisterous voices.

equal flaps, one draping itself over the front of the face, the

Nebuchadnezzar

The soul," he'd said one night by a campfire in the Valley of the Kings, "is like a falcon. Despite its loyalty to the falconer, it longs to fly free.

the reason he didn't fear death was because he had accepted his place—minuscule as an atom, insignificant as a mayfly—in a mystery and a miracle beyond full comprehension. It was enough to have participated in it and to have achieved as much as one could while here. "I

She tried to cry out, but her throat was so parched that only a croak emerged. She took a swig from her canteen, wiped the dust from her face with another splash, then shouted, "Here! It's here!

his view, a corpse was merely an empty vessel for the spirit it had housed. "The soul," he'd said one night by a campfire in the Valley of the Kings, "is like a falcon. Despite its loyalty to the falconer, it longs to fly free. When my time comes, let my soul soar into the wind and the sky. Wherever its natural home is meant to be, that's where it will go." Although she had found such

Where Einstein was pushing the boundaries of knowledge forward, in the hope of learning ever more, Rashid was studying the past, in the hope of gleaning from it what man might, to his sorrow, have forgotten.

He and his young colleague, the Austrian mathematician Kurt Gödel, had an understanding: they knew that either one of them might be so deeply absorbed in thought that any disturbance could prove fatal to whatever work was being done, and if there was no immediate response to an interruption—such as a knock—then it was best to retire quietly until another time.

They fell silent again—the only sound the constant, powerful thrumming of the engines. This tanker, the second largest in the Calais company fleet, carried 360,000 cubic feet of liquefied natural gas.

From New York Harbor to Grand Central Station, then onto a train to a place called Princeton Junction. Once there, Simone and her father had been shuttled to a single railcar that traveled on a short spur line, no more than a mile or two long, which terminated at the foot of the university campus.

were fighting grimly, and at huge cost, to reclaim the ground lost at the beginning of the war. The fierce battle over a little town called Saint-Lô, in

Despite all the sailing he had done in his life, he knew that he remained a wretched sailor—once he had absentmindedly run his craft onto the shoals, another time into a buoy—and to make matters worse, he could hardly swim a stroke. It was a skill that he had always meant to acquire, but never managed to find time for.

Men went about killing each other in the most ingenious ways they could imagine, and on a scale never before seen, but at the same time, they insisted on making up rules of engagement to preserve a facade of civilization and morality.

THE BERING STRAIT, 1918 "Sergei, do not die," the girl said, turning around in the open boat. "I forbid you to die." She had hoped, in vain, that her voice would not falter. When she tried to reach out to him, he pulled away, still holding on to the tiller with dead-white fingers.

humming a few bars of vintage Springsteen.

Maybe time was an illusion after all, as some of the latest scientific theories seemed to suggest.