"Someone once told me that archaeologists are anthropologists who don’t like live people. They dig up dead ones because dead ones can’t talk back. That’s not quite true. But I think live people are too fast for most archaeologists. We’re a slow-moving lot. We look at a change in pottery technology that took a hundred years and say that’s pretty quick. We’re used to taking our time."

““You may learn a few things,” she said. “And that’s always good.”

“What do you do when you are falling? Do you reach out and try to grab for support? If you aren’t careful, you will pull others down with you. Unless you are very careful.”

““Picture postcards never show the bugs,” I told her. “Stinging ants, wasps, fleas, roaches the size of your hand. Postcards never show the heat.”

“Gazing at those beautiful stars, Bailey realized that nothing mattered to them. All the achievements of humankind were insignificant. Love and hate, death and life, honor and dishonor, knowledge or ignorance—what did any of that matter in the face of this austere and heartless splendor?”

“Do not look for revelations in the ancient ruins. You will find here only what you bring: bits of memory, wisps of the past as thin as clouds in the summer, fragments of stone that are carved with symbols that sometimes almost make sense.”

“Metaphor is reality once removed.”