But there is a limit to thinking about even a small piece of something monumental. You still see the shadow of the whole rearing up behind you, and you become lost in your thoughts in part from the panic of realizing the size of that imagined leviathan.

A word devoid of thought is a dead thing, and a thought unembodied in words remains a shadow.

He drank deeply from his orange juice - really drank to savor it so that for a minute or two nothing existed in the house but his enjoyment.

There were no reasons so mighty that they could override the desire to be in accord with the tides and the passage of seasons and the rhythms underlying everything around me.

Because Control knew that belief in a scientific process only took you so far. The ziggurats of illogic erected by your average domestic terrorist as he or she bought the fertiliser or made a detonator took on their own teetering momentum and power. When those towers crashed to the earth, they still existed whole in the perpetrator’s mind, and everyone else’s too – just for different reasons.

We live in a universe driven by chance,” his father had said once, “but the bullshit artists all want causality.