"He now understood navigation. He had started with Gower's Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Navigation. ...The book itself was the ocean; when he closed it he could cover up deep water. He had read Moore's Practical Navigator and had tried Euclid. He found arithmetic easy, because nobody pushed him."

“I'm not afraid because I can only imagine nothingness as rather quiet.”

“If he could just stay there and gaze upon the land like a stone, whole centuries long, while grassy plains became forests and swamps turned into villages or tilled land. ...He'd be recognized as human only when he stirred.”

“The game went on. John had understood nothing. Everything was too fast: the game, the other's talk, the goings-on in the street...”

“The spirit of history can't be caught in pictures. ...History, seriously pursued, belongs in the realm of uncertainty. A picture is a certainty.”

“Someday he'd be quicker... to be like the sun, which only seems to wander slowly across the sky, yet whose rays are as quick as the blink of an eye. ...they reach in one instant the most distant mountains.”

“Present and past—what had Dr. Orme said about that? The light was most fully in the present when, flaring up, it met John's eye directly. Whatever else he saw must have been lit up before and now shone only within his own eye—a light of the past.”